The Rise of Indium

What is indium? It's a rare metal mainly found in zinc ores, used in the production of touch screens. Before the touchscreen industry exploded in the last few years, indium wasn't very valuable. In fact, indium is mainly valued for its role in producing the liquid crystals needed for the screens in iPhones, the Nintendo DS, and other consumer goods with touch screens.

The extrinsic value of indium has of course risen with the boom of the touchscreen industry. However, wouldn't the conversation change drastically if indium was found to be detrimental to human health or to the environment? For example, the paper industry become demonized in the 1980s because of all the paper waste produced in offices. There was a push towards the idea of "paperless offices," where computers would eliminate the need for so much paper. Instead, paper consumption (through printing, faxing, and photocopying) and waste has more than doubled since then. Plastics, once thought to be a godsend, have 1.) become so pervasive in the environment that there is an "island" of plastic in the Pacific Ocean larger than Texas and 2.) contaminated the environment with phthalates, an endocrine disruptor that is causing the feminization of amphibians, and possibly lowering the fertility of males. Indium is not known to be used by any organism. With the rise in our daily exposure to indium, only time can tell if there are any negative consequences that result from this interaction.

RCRA: What Crisis Led to its Formation

Before the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, most of our disposal was conducted through open dumping or placed in loosely-regulated local landfills. Its 1976 amendment, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, was created with the intent of promoting better solid waste disposal methods, mainly by granting money to local and state governments for research on waste disposal.

RCRA and its amendments addressed three pressing issues and concerns of that time: the need for a solid waste management system, that dealing with hazardous wastes required special provisions, and the encouragement of resource conservation and recovery through recycling and reuse of resources.

Before RCRA, a large portion of the hazardous waste in the United States was dumped very close to the site where it was generated, or generators of hazardous waste paid for its shipment to off-site disposal areas. Records at disposal sights were not kept and the property was often sold to others who had no information about any presence of hazardous materials. The Love Canal story is a perfect example of this type of crisis that demonstrated the need for a regulation like RCRA.

Costa Rica Biofuel Mandate

http://www.mercer.edu/enp/enp305/bb_fact_sheet.pdf

What is the Oldest Environmental Policy?

The earth's resources are limited. Because of this, people have had to conserve, reuse and recycle different types of scarce and valuable resources for as long as they have been around. In early farming communities, for example, compost made out of animal manure and other unused organic material from the farm was used as a homemade type of fertilizer. Native American tribes were known for using every single part of the animals that they killed, which greatly reduced their waste, discouraged them from wastefully killing animals for sport, and reinforced the importance of conserving valuable resources. Even during the Great Depression, people salvaged almost everything they could and stored it for later, because of the looming idea that times would grow worse and those items could be useful, if they weren't already. It wasn't until everyday resources- food, water, and newer inventions such as plastics- became so widely and readily available that people became more wasteful. Thousands of years of resource conservation seemed to be reversed in a matter of decades. Today, people must be educated in the importance of this ancient environmental policy if we are to maintain the health of the earth and provide an optimistic future for our descendants.