Archive for the ‘Pollution’ Category

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Agent S, anyone?

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Serratia has dark history in region

Army test in 1950 may have changed microbial ecology

Serratia is a bacterium that some doctors and residents of the Bay Area have been familiar with for many years.

In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious disaster tale about the microbe.

serratiaThe Army used serratia to test whether enemy agents could launch a biological warfare attack on a port city such as San Francisco from a location miles offshore.

For six days in late September 1950, a small military vessel near San Francisco sprayed a huge cloud of serratia particles into the air while the weather favored dispersal.

Then the Army went looking to find out where it landed. Serratia is known for forming bright red colonies when a soil or water sample is streaked on a culture medium — a property that made it ideal for the bio-warfare experiment.

Army tests showed that the bacterial cloud had exposed hundreds of thousands of people in a broad swath of Bay Area communities including Sausalito, Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, San Leandro, San Francisco, Daly City and Colma, according to reports that later were declassified. Soon after the spraying, 11 people came down with hard-to-treat infections at the old Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco. By November, one man had died. Edward Nevin, 75, a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. worker recovering from a prostate operation, had succumbed to an infection with Serratia marcescens that attacked his heart valves.

More… ➡

– Research thanks to California Refugees In New Zealand

Posted in CrashBlogging, Mental Irrationality, Pollution, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Drowning in plastic: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of France

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world’s oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Worse still, there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up. So how do we turn the tide?

Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.

It was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early-retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii, at the helm of a 50ft catamaran that he had built himself.

For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.

‘It took us a week to get across and there was always some plastic thing bobbing by,’ says Moore, who speaks in a jaded, sardonic drawl that occasionally flares up into heartfelt oratory. ‘Bottle caps, toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn’t identify. It wasn’t a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here. Two years later I went back with a fine-mesh net, and that was the real mind-boggling discovery.’

Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 metres, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, in many colours, swirling like snowflakes or fish food. An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. Plastic won, and it wasn’t even close. ‘We found six times more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal,’ he says. ‘No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from.’

More… ➡

– Research Thanks to Robin S.

Posted in CrashBlogging, Pollution, The Perfect Storm | 12 Comments »

Tiny Tech Can Leave a Big Mess

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

nanotechnology– I’ve been concerned about nanotechnology for sometime ( ➡, ➡, and ➡).   It’s not that I don’t like the idea and don’t think it has a lot of future.  I read The Engines of Creation way back in 1988 and was deeply impressed by the promise of it all.

– My concerns are, rather, the way we’re going about it.   As always, humanity, in its impatience for maximum profit in the minimum time, is developing and dispersing these agents into our environment with no real idea of the possible consequences.   Just like all the industrial chemicals we’ve developed and employed in the past, we’re assuming these materials will not cause any problems – a least until we find out otherwise.

– I also read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle many years ago and if you haven’t heard the story of ICE-9, you should.

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Scientists try to clean up nanotechnology before it becomes a big business–and a big problem

Nanotechnology‘s image is sleek, modern and clean. But that’s not its reality.

Turns out that designing and manufacturing materials so small that 100,000 of them can fit comfortably on the width of a hair strand absorbs tremendous amounts of energy and is anything but neat.

“You can make a very green product with a very messy process,” said Mark Greenwood, a Washington lawyer and former director of U.S. EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics.

That “very messy process” is a problem for nanotech researchers trying, among other things, to design more efficient batteries, higher-performing solar cells, more effective water purifiers and more sensitive pollution detectors.

Consider what it takes to purify a nanomaterial of unwanted chemicals. Traditionally, that has required the repeated use of solvents – a lot of them, said James Hutchison, a professor at the University of Oregon.

“If you’re washing with a solvent, you’re wasting a lot of solvent,” Hutchison said. “This is the biggest contribution to waste we’ve been able to see. If you think about a lifecycle analysis on this, you see what’s the hot spot, and think about other ways to purify that don’t require solvent.”

Hutchison and others are trying to come at the nanotech problem with “green chemistry” techniques that emphasize materials, products and processes that reduce or eliminate hazardous substances and conserve energy and resources. His solution for the solvent waste: a nanofiltration membrane that separates nanomaterials from the rest.

Hutchison’s work is part of a larger University of Oregon effort that researchers call green nanoscience. In 2005, Hutchison launched the Safer Nanomaterials and Nanomanufacturing Initiative, which is funded by the Air Force and aims to develop nanotechnology to ensure high performance without threatening human health or the environment.

Because nanotechnology is still an emerging field, scientists believe there are opportunities to make it environmentally safe. “Now’s the time to think about how to make this stuff clean and green,” said David Rejeski, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.

But the technology is steaming ahead, and the opportunity is unlikely to last long.

More… ➡

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What we need vs. what we’ll get

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

– The current G-20 meeting has stirred a lot of commentary and hope.   The world has a lot of problems and there’s always the possibility and the hope, when a significant number of world leaders come together to talk about those problems, that they’ll make decisions that will improve things.The Browns and the Obamas

– Below, is an analysis by George Friedman of STRATFOR of the G-20 meeting and what’s likly to come out of it along with a look at a follow-on NATO meeting and an Obama-EU summit.  There’s even discussion of President Obama’s upcoming visit to Turkey, which will be his last stop on his current international trip.

– Other commentators might go through these same subjects; G-20, NATO, EU and Turkey and come to somewhat different conclusions about their meanings and prospects but I seriously doubt that anyone could seriously avoid my final conclusion – that what the world needs is not what the world is going to get out of all these meetings and pontifications.

– In the near-term, we need unified global strategies to pull the world out of the current economic melt-down.

– And, following immediately on the heels of such economic repairs, we need a deep recognition that mankind’s current dominate economic system, Capitalism, even when working well,  cannot continue as it is currently configured.   Its fundamental requirements of continuing growth and consumption to fuel itself, are axiomatically inconsistent with the fact that we live on a planet with finite resources.

– And, once we’ve rethought our basic economic systems and globally began to reorient them into something that focuses on sustainability rather than growth, then we need to move onto how we, globally, are going to defuse all the ecological and climatic destruction we’ve set in motion which is threatening to reset our climate and to initiate another major ecological die-off like the one that took out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

– That’s all.  It’s not much to ask, right?   Surely,the best and the brightest of our national leaders can see that these are the paths forward?

– Well, I wish I thought so, but I don’t.  Friedman’s analysis makes clear that in spite of the fact that we need radical new thinking, these meetings will end up driven by narrow national interests as nation jockeys against nation to see who’s going to do the work and pay the bills.

There’s your future, folks.– It’s as if we’re all sitting in a lifeboat at sea and we’re having meeting after meeting about how to best arrange the seating in the boat to determine who has to row and who gets to just sit and benefit. And all the time, the boat is slowing but inexorably sinking but no one can be bothered to talk about that because… because?     Damned if I know.

– Here’s George Freidman’s analysis.   See what you think:

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Three major meetings will take place in Europe over the next nine days: a meeting of the G-20, a NATO summit and a meeting of the European Union with U.S. President Barack Obama. The week will define the relationship between the United States and Europe and reveal some intra-European relationships. If not a defining moment, the week will certainly be a critical moment in dealing with economic, political and military questions. To be more precise, the meeting will be about U.S.-German relations. Not only is Germany the engine of continental Europe, its policies diverge the most sharply from those of the United States. In some ways, U.S.-German relations have been the core of the U.S.-European relationship, so this marathon of summits will focus on the United States and Germany.

Although the meetings deal with a range of issues — the economy and Afghanistan chief among them — the core question on the table will be the relationship between Europe and the United States following the departure of George W. Bush and the arrival of Barack Obama. This is not a trivial question. The European Union and the United States together account for more than half of global gross domestic product. How the two interact and cooperate is thus a matter of global significance. Of particular importance will be the U.S. relationship with Germany, since the German economy drives the Continental dynamic. This will be the first significant opportunity to measure the state of that relationship along the entire range of issues requiring cooperation.

Relations under Bush between the United States and the two major European countries, Germany and France, were unpleasant to say the least. There was tremendous enthusiasm throughout most of Europe surrounding Obama’s election. Obama ran a campaign partly based on the assertion that one of Bush’s greatest mistakes was his failure to align the United States more closely with its European allies, and he said he would change the dynamic of that relationship.

There is no question that Obama and the major European powers want to have a closer relationship. But there is a serious question about expectations. From the European point of view, the problem with Bush was that he did not consult them enough and demanded too much from them. They are looking forward to a relationship with Obama that contains more consultation and fewer demands. But while Obama wants more consultation with the Europeans, this does not mean he will demand less. In fact, one of his campaign themes was that with greater consultation with Europe, the Europeans would be prepared to provide more assistance to the United States. Europe and Obama loved each other, but for very different reasons. The Europeans thought that the United States under Obama would ask less, while Obama thought the Europeans would give more.

More… ➡

– research thanks to Michael M.

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Capitalism & Corporations, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Mental Irrationality, Peak Oil, Politics - The Wrong Way, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Drinking bottled water is drinking oil

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

– Do you drink bottled water?   Well, if you do and you also consider yourself a green health oriented person, it is probably long past time for you to sit up and take notice of articles like this.   And believe me, if you want more information – don’t go to the companies who are selling you this 21st century snake-oil – they flat-out have no interest in telling you the sad truth on this one.

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ScienceNOW reports a new paper by Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley in Environmental Research Letters that compares the energy use of bottled and tapwater:

… From start to finish, bottled water consumes between 1100 and 2000 times more energy on average than does tap water.

Bottled water consumption has skyrocketed over the past several years. In 2007, some 200 billion liters of bottled water were sold worldwide, and Americans took the biggest gulp: 33 billion liters a year, an average of 110 liters per person. That amount has grown 70% since 2001, and bottled water has now surpassed milk and beer in sales. Many environmental groups have been concerned with this surge because they suspected that making and delivering a bottle of water used much more energy than did getting water from the tap. But until now, no one really knew bottled water’s energy price tag.

Environmental scientist Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland, California, and his colleague Heather Cooley have added up the energy used in each stage of bottled-water production and consumption. Their tally includes how much energy goes into making a plastic bottle; processing the water; labeling, filling, and sealing a bottle; transporting it for sale; and cooling the water prior to consumption.

more… ➡

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Ocean Acidification from CO2 Is Happening Faster Than Thought

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

A lesser-known consequence of having a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air is the acidification of water. Oceans naturally absorb the greenhouse gas; in fact, they take in roughly one third of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activities. When CO2 dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid, the same substance found in carbonated beverages. New research now suggests that seawater might be growing acidic more quickly than climate change models have predicted.

Marine ecologist J. Timothy Wootton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues spent eight years compiling measurements of acidity, salinity, temperature and other data from Tatoosh Island off the northwestern tip of Washington State. They found that the average acidity rose more than 10 times faster than predicted by climate simulations.

Highly acidic water can wreak havoc on marine life. For instance, it can dissolve the calcium carbonate in seashells and coral reefs [see “The Dangers of Ocean Acidification,” by Scott C. Doney; Scientific American, March 2006]. In their study, published in the December 2 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Wootton and his team discovered that the balance of ecosystems shifted: populations of large-shelled animals such as mussels and stalked barnacles dropped, whereas smaller-shelled species and noncalcareous algae (species that lack calcium-based skeletons) became more abundant. “I see it as a harbinger of the trends we might expect to occur in the future,” says oceanographer Scott C. Doney of the Woods Hole Ocean­ographic Institution, who did not participate in this study.

More… ➡

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Government Fails to Assess Potential Dangers of Nanotechnology

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

– You’d think that we’d learn from past mistakes but we don’t seem to. We’ve put hundreds, even thousands, of novel chemicals never before seen by nature out into the environment – often with minimal or no testing. And the results have not been good. DDT and Thalidomide were two high profile examples but there are many others. it is easy for the urban dwellers among us to ignore what’s going on with the disappearing frogs and bees of the world – but it all means something and it doesn’t bode well.

– Now, we’ve created nanotechnology chemistry and we’re moving straight into using these new chemicals and freely distributing them into the environment – again with little or no testing.

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The little beast

Scientists charge the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies are failing to assess the potential dangers of puny particles

Pesticide DDT, industrial lubricants PCBs and now plastic BPA (bisphenol A) are all widely used industrial chemical compounds that have been discovered to cause ills such as cancer and/or environmental damage. Worried that the latest chemical craze—nanoparticles (molecules and even atoms engineered at the scale of one billionth of a meter or smaller)—may follow suit, a panel of scientists is urging federal government agencies to assess the potential risks posed by such engineered chemicals and particles before they are used in any more substances.

The National Research Council, one of The National Academies in Washington, D.C., (scientific advisory bodies for the federal government) charges that the 18 government bodies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tasked with assessing chemical safety, have failed to prove that the diminutive particles are not dangerous. The group also charged in a new report that the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), the government body created to oversee such efforts, lacks a coherent plan for ensuring that current and future uses of nanotechnology do not pose a risk to human health or the environment.

Nanotechnology risk research “needs to be proactive—identifying possible risks and ways to mitigate risks before the technology has a widespread commercial presence,” the report says. Instead the NNI “does not have the essential elements of a research strategy—it does not present a vision, contain a clear set of goals [or] have a plan of action.”

More than 800 widely available products, including cosmetics, sporting goods and video displays, contain some form of nanotechnology, whether engineered particles or compounds, according to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (a Washington, D.C. think tank created by Congress in 1968). That number is set to grow as nanotech comes to items such as food additives and medical treatments.

More… ➡

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Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Nanotechnology, Pollution, The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

Thinking about a thousand-year depression

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

– An excellent piece from The Automatic Earth; a Blog I’ve just started following.

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Cyclical terms like “recession” and “depression” are looking less appropriate by the day. It’s like calling the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance a “depression”.

I know the our situation is vastly different from the state of the world in Roman times, but the idea that we could be on the brink of a fundamental reset of civilization is intriguing, to say the least.

I’ve been convinced for several years that we are looking at the convergence of a set of wicked interlocking global problems — ecological problems (climate chaos, the death of the oceans, fresh water shortages etc.), energy shortages due to fossil fuel depletion, and overpopulation with the resulting pressure on the global food supply. This convergence is happening under the umbrella of the current global financial collapse that constrains our ability to respond to any of these problems individually, let alone any further problems that might emerge from interactions between them.

This unfortunate collision makes the future of our civilization very murky indeed. Writers like James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, Carolyn Baker and Sharon Astyk (along with people like Stoneleigh and Ilargi at The Automatic Earth) have been warning about the possibility of a generalized, unrecoverable collapse of modern civilization for a while now. They have generally been derided by the mainstream as millennialist prophets of doom — driven more by their own subconscious fears and dark desires, their research full of confirmation bias.

The events unfolding around us now, however, cast their optimistic mainstream critics in a somewhat different light. None of them — even the Roubinis and Krugmans – have fully appreciated the severity of the world’s financial predicament. Their comforting bromides (and even their more pessimistic utterances) have been overwhelmed by events on a weekly basis. It has become clear that for all their careful analysis of trunks and tails, nobody truly understood the shape of the entire elephant.

This evident failure of comprehension brings their entire analysis into disrepute. And that should make us ask – if they failed to comprehend the underpinnings of a calamity in their own domain, what does that say about the possibility that they also failed to understand the dangers being trumpeted by the doomers they have derided?

After all, we are seeing the same outcome in the climate crisis as in the financial one – the trends are uniformly negative, and are unfolding much faster than the professionals in either field predicted. There are new signs from world bodies like the International Energy Agency that the same situation is developing with respect to the world’s oil supply – the more pessimistic members of the Peak Oil crowd appear to be heading for vindication.

So, following a “major, rapid contraction” (aka collapse), could our civilization end up staying on the mat, unable to rise from the ashes of our former glory? That’s unknowable of course, but hardly inconceivable. Several factors give that speculation some foundation.

The first confounding factor is the spectre of irreversible climate change. That could irreparably damage the world’s food production capacity through shifts in rainfall and the reduction of snow and glacial cover that supplies much of the world’s fresh water for agriculture.

The second factor is the permanent depletion of the compact, high-density, transportable energy supply represented by fossil fuels. We’re putting a lot of effort into developing electrical alternatives, of course. There are two major challenges in the way, though. The first is the relative infancy of the industry, and the fact that it will require both capital and fossil fuels to enable its continued growth. The second longer term problem is that the use of electricity requires a higher level of technology in the infrastructure needed to manufacture, distribute, store and convert it into work. This may not seem like much of a a problem today, but if our global industrial civilization goes into a decline, growing parts of the world may find the maintenance of such infrastructure increasingly difficult.

A third factor that may get in the way of recovery is the depletion of easily-recoverable resources such as metals. The decline in the average quality of various ores being mined today is well documented, and is likely to continue. While recycling can recover much of the metal currently discarded as waste, recycling facilities capable of producing enough output to feed our civilization’s needs do not yet exist. They would face the same hurdles as the build-out of electrical supplies I described above.

You might think that such a situation will take so long to develop that we will be able to address the situation before it gets quite that dire.

One consideration that works against that hope is that human beings are not, for all their cleverness, fully rational creatures. Research has shown that most of our “rational” decisions are made at a deeply unconscious level, to be dressed up with rational justifications only upon their emergence into the conscious mind some time later. The truth of this proposition can be seen all around us in the competition between environmental remediation and economic imperatives, in the obstruction of alternative energy development, in our repeated creation of financial bubbles — in all the myriad ways in which we as a society work tirelessly against our own best interests as individuals and as a species.

Even worse, events have recently shown a terrifying ability to outstrip our expectations, in both speed and severity. We may not have nearly as much time left as we think. A lack of time coupled with an inability to respond rationally (or even to accept the evidence of our eyes) does not bode well for the future of this civilization.

It’s conceivable that our current civilization will never regain its feet after this storm has burst upon us. We will endure as a species no matter what happens, of course, and it’s even probable that we will rise to new heights. It’s also quite possible that the rebirth of this Phoenix will take a long, long time and that those new heights will be unrecognizable to someone raised in today’s world of 401(k)’s, Credit Default Swaps, automobiles and gigantic concrete cities.

– To the original: ➡

– Research thanks to Kael for this.

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Fundamentalism, Mental Irrationality, Ocean Acidification, Pandemics, Peak Oil, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | 2 Comments »

Nice prawns, shame about the chemical cocktail

Friday, November 14th, 2008

– My wife and I have been growing increasing skeptical of some of the food offered up to us at our local supermarkets.  Shrimp is the one that comes to mind.  A story here and a story there about shrimp being grown in China in filthy ponds badly contaminated with human waste and then fed large quantities of antibiotics to keep them healthy enough to make it onto our supermarket shelves have turned me off.

– I remember asking pointedly at a Red Lobster restaurant a year or two back about just where their shrimp came from and, apparently, it wasn’t the first time they’d been asked.  I got a rather angry response back from our server saying that of course they buy them on the market at the best price they can get – they are, after all, a for-profit restaurant chain.  She never actually said, however, if they came from China or not.Shrimp, yes?

– I just went onto Red Lobster’s web site to see what they had to say about where they sourced their shrimp from and what kind of quality control they might have.   They have a nice page here ➡ that talks about all the good things they do -but there’s no mention of shrimp here which is, perhaps, a bit worrisome?

– More recently, when my wife and I were discussing this, she told me that she’d asked them at the Trader Joe’s where she shops.   They’d quite proudly told her that they were no longer getting their shrimp from China.   Now they were sourcing them out of Vietnam.

– And, most recently, in our local Albertson’s Market, I’d come across a little pamplet in the meat section extolling the virtues of Wild American Shrimp. I’d been fascinated and took one home and showed it to my wife.

– She’d asked if I thought these folks, the Wild AmericanShrimp people were fishing responsibly and renewable.  I had to say I didn’t know for sure.  I’d been to their web site and it said they were fishing in an environmentally conscious way – but how does one really know?

– I’ve got to tell you this, though.   After reading the article, below, about how the shrimp are grown in Asia, I’m going to eat Wild American Shrimp or their equivalents – or none at all.  Yuk!

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No longer a luxury item, king prawns have become a staple on our supermarket fish counters – but at what price? Alex Renton reports from Vietnam where impoverished producers have adopted some alarming intensive farming practices

There’s no lack of building materials around the prawn ponds of the Mekong Delta. Walls are constructed of the empty plastic sacks of pesticides and prawn feed. It’s cheap, but sweaty. Southern Vietnam is hot and sticky at any time and the humid air inside the Huong family’s one-room hut, perched on a prawn-pond dyke, is rank with chemicals: we cough and sneeze when we enter. There’s an acrid dust all over the mud floor, which makes you worry for little Huong Thi Mai, who is seven, a patient little girl sitting on the low bed near the door watching her parents work. I glance at her bare shins for signs of the skin infections that are common among prawn-farm workers, but she looks OK.

Mr Huong is proud: ‘This is a very modern prawn-farming business,’ he says. And, with luck and four months’ hard labour, it is going to make him and his family quite rich. After they’ve paid their debts, the Huongs hope to buy a moped and their first fridge. Thi Mai might go to a new school. ‘We can have a better life,’ says Mrs Huong. But until the tiger prawns are ready for harvest, and shipped off to Europe or America, the family must live here, keeping a 24-hour watch beside the sour-smelling pond. They’ve borrowed £4,000, a huge sum, to invest in prawn larvae, feed and medicines – and they need to keep alert in case anyone steals the growing crustaceans.

Modernity, for Mr Huong, appears to be chiefly measured in chemicals. I count 13 different pots, jars and sacks of these in the hut, and he eagerly talks me through them. He’s particularly keen on a compound called ‘Super Star’ – the Vietnamese print on the label says it ‘intensifies the metabolism to help prawns grow fat’. He learnt about this additive on a government-run course at the local fishery training centre. ‘We’re not allowed to use much – only 10 bottles per crop,’ he says.

There are other glossy labels – most of them for products made in Thailand, the centre of the world’s prawn farming industry. Mr Huong mixes up a feed in a big white basin while we talk. The basic feed, he says, is soya, broken rice and fish and prawn parts. But in it goes a large dose of ‘Amino-Pro’. ‘It will help the shrimp taste better,’ he says. The label has familiar words from stock- cube packets: aspartic acid, glutamic acid and taurine, which is the key element of the energy drink Red Bull. Then there is Vitamix, ‘to make prawns grow faster’, Calphorax ‘to help the shell thicken and give better colour’ and Vin Superclear ‘to kill pest, virus and smell’. And on top is a seasoning of antibiotic.

Prawn farming is an ancient activity in tropical countries. Coastal peoples in Indonesia and Vietnam have trapped young marine prawns in brackish ponds for at least 500 years, feeding them up with fish scraps and household waste to eat or sell. The prawns, properly farmed, are sweet and juicy: it’s a lucrative business. The larvae can reach marketable size, as long as your hand, in as little as four months. But the trade has changed utterly since black tiger prawns (known as ‘shrimp’ in most countries) and bamboo prawns became a routine luxury in the rich world in the 1990s. The ancient cottage industry was swiftly industrialised. Around the tropical belt, from Ecuador to Indonesia, coastal farmers punched holes in the sea defences and let salt water into their paddy fields for the gold rush.

More… ➡

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Chinese Factory Worker Can’t Believe The Shit He Makes For Americans

Friday, November 14th, 2008

FENGHUA, CHINA—Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the “sheer amount of shit Americans will buy.”

“Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ‘salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, ‘There’s no way that anyone will ever buy these,'” Chen said during his lunch break in an open-air courtyard. “One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless shit?”

Chen, 23, who has worked as an injection-mold operator at the factory since it opened in 1996, said he frequently asks himself these questions during his workweek, which exceeds 60 hours and earns him the equivalent of $21.

“I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible.”

Among the items that Chen has helped create are plastic-bag dispensers, microwave omelet cookers, glow-in-the-dark page magnifiers, Christmas-themed file baskets, animal-shaped contact-lens cases, and adhesive-backed wall hooks.

“Sometimes, an item the factory produces resembles nothing I’ve ever seen,” Chen said. “One time, we made something that looked like a ladle, but it had holes in its cup and a handle that bent down 90 degrees. The foreman told us that it was a soda-can holder for an automobile. If you are lucky enough to own a car, sit back and enjoy the journey. Save the soda beverage for later.”

Chen added: “A cup holder is not a necessary thing to own.”

Chen expressed similar confusion over the tens of thousands of pineapple corers, plastic eyeshades, toothpick dispensers, and dog pull-toys that he has helped manufacture.

“Why the demand for so many kitchen gadgets?” Chen said. “I can understand having a good wok, a rice cooker, a tea kettle, a hot plate, some utensils, good china, a teapot with a strainer, and maybe a thermos. But all these extra things—where do the Americans put them? How many times will you use a taco-shell holder? ‘Oh, I really need this silverware-drawer sorter or I will have fits.’ Shut up, stupid American.”

Chen added that many of the items break after only a few uses.

“None are built to last very long,” Chen said. “That is probably so the Americans can return to buy more. Not even the badly translated assembly instructions deter them. If I bought a kitchen item that came with such poor Mandarin instructions, I would return the item immediately.”

May Gao of the Hong Kong-based labor-advocacy group China Labour Bulletin said complaints like Chen’s are common among workers in China’s bustling industrial cities.

“Last week, I took testimony from several young female workers from Shenzhen who said they were locked in a work room for 18 straight hours making inflatable Frisbees,” Gao said. “Finally, the girls joined hands on the factory floor and began to chant, ‘No more insane flying toys for Western pigs!’ They quickly lost their jobs and were ostracized by their families, but the incident was a testament to China’s growing disillusionment with producing needless crap for fat-ass foreigners.”

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