The 5 People Responsible for Mankind’s Most Toxic Inventions

Just like the men whose inventions caused their own deaths, those who conceived the biggest man-made threats to the natural world had no idea what they were doing when they began. Men like Thomas Edison and Karl Benz likely saw fame, money and possibly even the good of mankind as the benefits of their innovative creations. Unfortunately for all of us, their inventions have instead damaged the environment possibly beyond repair and have the potential to continue making things much, much worse. As in, end of the world worse. Here are five guys who thought they were making something way cool, but whose ideas have turned out to be some of mankind’s most destructive inventions of all time.

Plastic

Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first truly synthetic plastic in 1905. A combination of formaldehyde and phenol, Bakelite set the stage for all of the plastics that were to come. In the first few decades of its existence, plastic was hailed almost as a miracle substance – ads touting the wonders of ‘fantastic plastic’ made it appear to be the path to a futuristic world. Certainly, the world has never been the same since. While it undoubtedly made life more convenient, it has also become one of the most polluting substances known to mankind. Plastics contain chemicals like dioxin and pthalates, which are known to be harmful to humans and the environment. One frightening fact about plastic is that nearly every single piece ever produced still exists today. Plastic bags and bottles litter the earth in staggering amounts that multiply daily. To get an idea of how bad the situation really is, check out “World of Waste: America’s Mass Consumption in Images” at Eco-Chick.

Diesel Fuel

German engineer Rudolf Diesel began working on what would be known as the diesel engine in 1892. Diesel first designed his engine to be run on hempseed oil and other vegetable oils, which would have been a far better choice for the environment but is not as cheap as the petroleum distillate now commonly known as diesel fuel, or petrodiesel. Diesel committed suicide in 1913 due to financial issues. Although he didn’t live to see his engine implemented in motor vehicles, the fuel that we know as diesel fuel today was named after his invention.

Unfortunately, diesel fuel has proven to be one of the top sources of pollution - specifically, the dirtiest and cheapest type of diesel fuel available, bunker oil. Bunker oil is used to power large ships, which are quickly causing U.S. ports to be the top sources of pollution in the world. Petrodiesel is also responsible for the lovely thick clouds of black smoke you see streaming from the tailpipes of large vehicles. Poor Rudolf Diesel would probably not be too proud of the destruction that his invention spawned in the world and it’s rather ironic that he killed himself by jumping into the ocean from a large ship (albeit a steam powered one).

The Motor Vehicle

Karl Benz is credited with the invention of the modern automobile after building and selling the first four-wheeled vehicle in 1893. He also designed and patented the internal combustion flat engine, and the Benz Patent Motorwagon became the first commercially available automobile in 1888. As they say, the rest is history, and motor vehicles now cover the earth and spew forth pollution like a biblical plague. The problem with automobiles isn’t limited air pollution; it’s also the strain on energy resources and contaminants that are left behind such as antifreeze, grease, oil and metals. The environmental destruction left in the wake of the motor vehicle affects our water sources and the soil in which we grow our food. The motor vehicle is the single easiest way to turn one human being into a polluting machine.

The Power Plant

One of history’s greatest and most celebrated minds, Thomas Edison, invented the first power plant in 1882. His invention of the incandescent light bulb three years previously had paved the way for electric power, causing him to form the Edison Electric Illuminating Company to build power stations in New York City. Pearl Street Station began generating electricity on September 4th of 1882, and ran on a single steam powered generator.

As the years passed, coal became a more common source of power, and by the 1920’s pulverized coal was the norm. The use of coal as fuel for electric plants has a wide range of environmental implications, not the least of which starts with coal mining, which causes severe erosion and results in the leaching of toxic chemicals into nearby waterways. Of course, coal mining has been going on for centuries, but has greatly accelerated in the past century due to its use in coal-fired power plants. Two-thirds of sulfur dioxide, one-third of carbon dioxide and one-quarter of total nitrogen oxide emissions in the U.S. are produced by the burning of coal. Asthma, respiratory diseases, smog and acid rain are just a few of the coal industry’s lovely side effects.

The Atomic Bomb

Though many credit Albert Einstein with this invention, the person responsible is in fact Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian-American scientist who developed the idea of the nuclear chain reaction and created the Manhattan Project. Szilárd did enlist the help of Einstein in writing a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraging the creation of a nuclear defense program, but that was the extent of Einstein’s involvement. This was during World War II, when the Nazis were known to be working on similar technology. As the war went on, Szilárd came to resent the way the military seized control of his invention and became deeply bitter about the use of the atomic bomb against civilians after Truman bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Though we haven’t yet experienced its full effects, the atomic bomb is perhaps the single biggest man-made threat to the environment. A small nuclear war would cause a global environmental catastrophe. A nuclear blast would create black smoke, firestorms and radioactive particles that would completely devastate the entire globe, and the immediate effects would create climate anomalies that would last at least 10 years. Nuclear weapons are far more dangerous to the earth than global warming, and as we speak, India and Pakistan are quietly ramping back up their nuclear programs. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would kill millions and unleash catastrophic health and environmental problems.

Link [Neatorama} + [Eco-Chick] + [Wikipedia] + [LiveScience] + [The Indian]

Photo credit: Time Magazine, Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Commons

SUVs Going Down in Value, Filling Up Used Car Lots due to Gas Prices

Praise be, y’all, sports utility vehicles are going down in value. Are people actually learning a lesson, here? SUVs are flooding the used car market as people realize that the behemoths are unnecessary, stupid environment killers – no, scratch, that, it’s because of gas prices. Well, whatever works, right?

Ridelust has it:

Most owners who go to a car dealership looking to trade their current ride in for something new usually come out shell-shocked when they learn what the dealership is willing to give them for their trade. Those choosing to turn in their SUV right now will certainly be finding their trade-in value far from what they had invisioned.

According to CNW Marketing Research and the AP SUV sales were down 14% in the month of March when compared to March of 2007. The darling SUV of the American Auto Industry no longer sparkles under the looming clouds of $4/gallon fuel prices. In the face of such a decline in value the only solution for many SUV owners looking to downsize may be to sell their vehicle themselves; a task many owners dread. Even diesel trucks are not immune to the declines in value.

All this has GM concerned that their ‘Green Car of the Year’, the Chevrolet Tahoe 2-Mode Hybrid will suffer a similar fate. The Tahoe Hybrid might get more miles to the gallon, but the $10,000-$15,000 markup probably doesn’t make it worth the cost, especially when depreciation is taken into consideration.

Don’t make any sudden moves, people. We are slowly sliding toward the edge of common sense and responsibility, but we don’t want to scare these SUV-loving folks into realizing they’re actually doing something good for the environment. They’re cringing as they trade in their cars, waiting for the chorus of I-Told-You-So’s, and rubbing it in could well make them want to keep their suburban monsters out of pure spite. The idea of doing things like those fruity Your-a-Peein’s doesn’t sit well with Middle America, no sirree.

Link [RideLust]

Photo credit: Flickr user reedbiotch

Unbelievable Waste: Mazda Destroys 4,703 New Cars Worth $100 Million

BoingBoing has an incredible video of nearly 5,000 brand new, straight from the factory Mazdas being flattened at a junkyard. The total value of these cars was $100 million. The Wall Street Journal has it:

It all started about two years ago, when a ship carrying 4,703 shiny new Mazdas nearly sank in the Pacific. The freighter, the Cougar Ace, spent weeks bobbing on the high seas, listing at a severe 60-degree angle, before finally being righted.

The mishap created a dilemma: What to do with the cars? They had remained safely strapped down throughout the ordeal — but no one knew for sure what damage, if any, might be caused by dangling cars at such a steep angle for so long. Might corrosive fluids seep into chambers where they don’t belong? Was the Cougar Ace now full of lemons?

Crazy – couldn’t they just have had mechanics test the cars to see if damage really was done? Or, sell them at a buy-at-your-own-risk discount? Hopefully the metal will at least be reused, because this seems like a huge amount of extremely unnecessary trash.

Link [Wall Street Journal] via [BoingBoing]

Opportunists See Dollar Signs as Food Prices Spur Rainforest Destruction

What do you know, chaos and suffering is causing some folks in the position of power to take advantage of the situation. Will wonders never cease?

As people are starting to get worried about the future of our food sources, farmers in Brazil are getting excited about the prospect of making money by cutting down trees in the rainforest, burning the land and making way for pasture and crops.

Envirolink has it:

“At the very edge of the agricultural frontier, it’s very dynamic and that’s why you get statistics for deforestation that swing wildly from one year to the next,” said Roberto Cavalcanti of Conservation International.

“A small shift in food prices can have a big impact on whether it’s economical or not to move into the forest.”

The governor of Mato Grosso, one of Brazil’s biggest farming states, last week advocated more deforestation as a solution to the sharp rises in staples such as rice that are threatening to push millions of people into hunger.

“There is no way to produce more food without occupying more land and taking down more trees,” Blairo Maggi, also Brazil’s largest soybean producer and widely known as the “King of Soy”, told the Folha news agency.

This seems like a really stupid move… at the first sign of a food crisis, we start moving in on the rainforests, which we’ve been trying to protect for decades? Isn’t there a better way, people? I’m no expert, but in the times of climate change and worries over the future of the entire planet, cutting down trees in the rainforest appears to be a very bad idea.

Link [Envirolink]

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Secret Culprit of Oil Consumption: Plastic Bags & Bottles

If you’re upset about the price of oil, your first instinct might be to point your finger at the usual suspects: the war, suburban housewives driving Hummers to the grocery store and oil companies that are taking the record profits and laughing all the way to the bank. While they’re definitely culpable, one thing you may not have thought of is your own contribution, even if you don’t own a car. Water bottles and plastic bags are a surprising culprit.

The Business Shrink has it:

The most reliable statistics from the Pacific Institute put America’s love affair with water bottles at 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006. Due to negative press on the possible health effects of the use, most people are aware water bottles are sold in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. In order to manufacture these bottles over 900,000 tons of plastic is needed. The mainstream manufacturing process that produces PET bottles requires a combination of natural gas and petroleum. The petroleum requirement is where the statistics show that America’s obsession could be hurting their wallets at the gas pump.

Bottom line, the production of 31.2 billion liters of water for the U.S. bottled water market took roughly 17.6 million barrels of oil.

America also uses an astounding 100 billion plastic bags per year, and it takes 12 million barrels of oil to produce them. When you add in worldwide consumption, we could save 120 million barrels of oil annually by switching to reusable bags.

Bottled water and all of these mountains of plastic bags are easy addictions to kick. Faucet-mounted filters, reusable bottles and reusable bags make it really easy to avoid consumption of so much petroleum. Honestly, what’s the problem here? Why do people have such a hard time making such a simple switch?

I’ve been carrying a set of cute little reusable bags to the grocery store for years now, and when I first started, the baggers would look at me like I was out of my mind and then acted like filling my bags instead of the plastic ones was some kind of insurmountable chore. Now they’re used to it though, and the more people start doing it, the more expected it will be.

Link [Business Shrink]

Photo credit: Flickr user klynslis

White House Preventing EPA From Testing Toxicity of Chemicals

What do you know, the White House and the EPA are in our ‘Planet Killers’ news once again. Congressional investigators have found that the Bush administration is keeping the EPA from performing important tests on chemicals to determine health effects. What they’re doing, basically, is allowing nonscientists to have a big say in the process, and keeping it a secret from the public (or trying to).

From MSNBC.com:

The administration’s decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program’s credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At issue is the EPA’s screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.

A new review process begun by the White House in 2004 is adding more speed bumps for EPA scientists, the GAO said in its report, which will be the subject of a Senate Environment Committee hearing Tuesday. A formal policy effectively doubling the number of steps was adopted two weeks ago.

While we’re stewing in a toxic mix of chemicals that could very well be altering our cells in a way that science has yet to identify and understand, the government is engaging in this chaotic game of ping pong where various agencies are throwing information back and forth at each other with no apparent rhyme or reason to the process. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, since hardly anything the government does is actually efficient, but this is a matter of life and death – literally.

What it amounts to is the government protecting chemical companies. How many industries has the Bush administration whored itself out to? It’s astounding.

Link [MSNBC]

Photo credit: Flickr user Foxtongue

D’oh! Earth to Online Retailers: Cut The Dumb Over-Packaging BS

Christ on a bicycle, this is some planet killing over-packaging madness. Gizmodo asked readers to submit photos of wasteful shipping from online retailers, and they delivered, providing dozens of images showing a handful of tiny items inside a giant box.

Of course, we could all help cut down on this sort of thing by shopping locally more often, but sometimes there’s a need to order online. Plus, from some retailers’ perspective, the issue is more complicated than just trying to solve it by not padding things as much.

Here’s the thing about shipping out products directly to customers: some items just plain need tons of padding. I once worked for an online retailer that sold very delicate sculptures made of easily breakable materials like glass, and UPS delivery guys and gals are famous for throwing boxes around like they contain pillows. When customers receive a broken shipment they paid thousands of dollars for, they call angrily blaming the retailer for not padding it well enough and demand a replacement immediately. This is wasteful in itself, and results in double the trips on a gas-guzzling UPS truck.

A small fragile item cushioned by biodegradable peanuts in a large recyclable box is one thing. However, the really boneheaded cases of over-packaging are the ones in which the giant box contains a tiny and virtually indestructible product, like Dell with their flash drives. The problem isn’t just the boxes themselves or the materials used to pad the items inside. Gizmodo explains it:

When a company like Dell or Amazon is shipping out thousands of small objects in large boxes every day, it takes up room on UPS and FedEx trucks. Clearly, many more trucks need to be on the road, consuming gas and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, to get these to where they need to go. If padded mailers or more appropriately sized boxes were used, it would allow for many more to fit in each truck, cutting down on the greenhouse gases emitted every day by shipping companies.

Retailers need to take responsibility for their shipping practices, and they need to do it now. Though most won’t be able to come up with custom-sized boxes for everything they sell (especially if they sell a wide variety of items), they can at least get smaller boxes for items that aren’t likely to break if thrown around a little bit. But retailers aren’t the only ones that can do something to help.

UPS, FedEx and your ilk: is it too much to ask to be a little more gentle with packages? And consumers, you can do your part too: first of all, when you receive packaging like this, complain to the company about it. Second, reuse all of the materials next time you send something out. Finally, if all you need is a single roll of scotch tape that you can pick up at the convenience store one block away, you have no business ordering it online.

Link [Gizmodo]

Accidental Planet Killing: So, These New Orleans Wetlands Actually ARE Good for Something…

Eco-Chick.com happened upon a very interesting old news article on the New York Times website. The self-congratulatory article, published in 1910 and titled “NEW ORLEANS’S PLANS FOR GREAT SUBURBS; Over a Million Acres of Marsh-Land Within Its Limits to be So Converted”, tells of plans to ‘reclaim’ this ‘unproductive’ land for use as gardens, homes, hamlets and towns.

The article proclaims the benefits of draining this land, including fewer alligators lurking around and less room for mosquitoes to breed. They even went so far as to promise better views from your car window driving into the city – because, you know, concrete is so much more beautiful than marsh lands.

Eco-Chick notes that the destruction of these wetlands may well have had something to do with the damage New Orleans suffered at the hands of Hurricane Katrina, considering that wetlands help protect the mainland against storm surges. They dug up this quote from the NOAA:

Low lying coastal areas in and around the Gulf Coast have always been susceptible to storm surge from hurricanes, but the situation has worsened over time as protective coastal wetlands have disappeared due to land subsidence and human intervention.

It’s just another example of how ‘progress’ has damaged the earth. We are sold so many bottles of snake oil for ‘the good of mankind’.

Link [Eco-Chick] + [New York Times]

Photo credit: Flickr user Prince Roy

EPA: Sit Back, Relax and Breathe in Some Coal Smoke at National Parks

Once again, the EPA is failing in what’s supposed to be their main goal: protecting the environment. You just fell over with surprise, right? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

The EPA will soon be allowing coal-fired power plants to set up shop next to national parks, lowering the protection of these areas from the highest level to “the lowest possible degree of protection” against spikes in pollution. The proposed changes would act to hide pollution from regulators, according to Mark Wenzler, clean air director of the National Parks Conservation Association.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Despite blunt internal criticism by its own staff experts, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proceeding with a plan by year’s end to revise regulations under the Clean Air Act that currently safeguard areas with some of the nation’s cleanest air.

Across the United States, 156 national parks, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges have been designated by Congress as Class-1 areas, granting them the toughest legal protection.

Officially, the EPA says it is proposing “refinements” to regulations that measure Class-1 air-quality standards.

But federal air-quality experts at the EPA and the National Park Service say the planned changes would be a backward step for air quality.

Naturally, what we all want when visiting national parks is to choke down black smoke and have formerly beautiful views obscured. Because, we aren’t there to enjoy the meager tracts of somewhat-untouched land that are left in America – no, we’re there to be poisoned and polluted.

Link [Christian Science Monitor] via [Treehugger]

Photo credit: Flickr user OneofThem