What Materials Are Dangerous ?

• Americium: a cancer inducing radioactive particle that you may find in smoke alarms.
• Mercury: Found in many objects, especially traditional flat CRT monitors. Negative health dangerous effects include sensory neural impairment, dermatitis, memory impairment, and muscular fatigue. Environmental effects in animal creatures include death, reduced fertility, slower development and general growth.
• Sulphur: You may find Sulphur in batteries. Health negative effects include internal organs (liver, kidney, heart) damage, throat and eyeirritation. Sulphuric acid is formed once it is released into the enviroment, which is what we want to prevent.
• BFRs: You may find that in the plastic parts of most electronics. Negative health effects include impaired development of the CNS (central nervous system), thyroid and liver difficulties. The same negative effects happen in both human and animals. (We’re animals, after all). Some of these materials were officially banned between the 70s to the 80s.
• Cadmium: You may find that substance in light-sensitive resistors, alloys that are resistant to corrosion and air-operated environments, and in some batteries as well. The most common type of cadmium is found in Nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries.
• Lead: You are able to find Lead in CRT monitor glass, and in lead-acidic batteries as well. An average fifteen inch cathode tube contains on average around one and a half pounds of lead, and other CRT monitors have an estimated eight pounds of lead (!!! )
• Beryllium oxide: You can find Beryllium oxide in some thermal substances as as the thermal grease used to attach computer CPUs to the heat sinks above them.

I really hope the new governmental laws will fulfill their goal and make all electronic companies in the US, and other nations as well hopefully, recycle their e-waste so that the environment’s damage from our industries will be kept to minimum.

Author: Jeremy Cohen, ecology activist and writer at E-Green, a company for handling electronic waste (e-Waste) based in Haifa, Israel. Feel free to get inside our website and read some of our stuff about ecology and the benefits of eliminating electronic waste. We will soon have an English version of the website.