Each day, headlines warn that baby bottles are leaching dangerous chemicals, nonstick pans are causing infertility, and plastic containers are making us fat. What if green chemistry could change all that? What if rather than toxics, our economy ran on harmless, environmentally-friendly materials? Elizabeth Grossman, an acclaimed journalist who brought national attention to the contaminants hidden in computers and other high tech electronics, now tackles the hazards of ordinary consumer products. She shows that for the sake of convenience, efficiency, and short-term safety, we have created synthetic chemicals that fundamentally change, at a molecular level, the way our bodies work. The consequences range from diabetes to cancer, reproductive and neurological disorders. Yet it's hard to imagine life without the creature comforts current materials provide - and Grossman argues we do not have to. A scientific revolution is introducing products that are 'benign by design', developing manufacturing processes that consider health impacts at every stage, and is creating new compounds that mimic rather than disrupt natural systems. Through interviews with leading researchers, Grossman gives us a first look at this radical transformation. Green chemistry is just getting underway, but it offers hope that we can indeed create products that benefit health, the environment, and industry.

A close examination of the questions facing communities across the United States where dam removal is on the environmental and political agenda.. Dams and diversions along America's rivers have transformed the country and in doing so created environmental problems whose resolution will, in many ways, determine how we live in the next century. There are over 75,000 dams in the country and almost no major river in the country remains undammed. But now, for the first time in our nation's history, the pace of dam removal has overtaken the pace of construction as communities across the country commit themselves to river restoration, including the removal of harmful dams.Questioning the value of dams requires a serious readjustment in the country's notion of progress, a prospect threatening to some and daunting to all. Watershed examines the implications of dam removal to America's rivers and their communities by exploring the stories of a number of places where dam removal and river restoration are now underway. This is a story of people and place, and of a vital turning point in the nation's relationship to its rivers. 0813367824 the Spirit of American Law : an Anthology

The Digital Age was expected to usher in an era of clean production, an alternative to smokestack industries and their pollutants. But as environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman reveals in this penetrating analysis of high tech manufacture and disposal, digital may be sleek, but it's anything but clean. Deep within every electronic device lie toxic materials that make up the bits and bytes, a complex thicket of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a host of other often harmful ingredients.
"High Tech Trash" is a wake-up call to the importance of the e-waste issue and the health hazards involved. Americans alone own more than two billion pieces of high tech electronics and discard five to seven million tons each year. As a result, electronic waste already makes up more than two-thirds of the heavy metals and 40 percent of the lead found in our landfills. But the problem goes far beyond American shores, most tragically to the cities in China and India where shiploads of discarded electronics arrive daily. There, they are "recycled"-picked apart by hand, exposing thousands of workers and community residents to toxics.
As Grossman notes, "This is a story in which we all play a part, whether we know it or not. If you sit at a desk in an office, talk to friends on your cell phone, watch television, listen to music on headphones, are a child in Guangdong, or a native of the Arctic, you are part of this story."
The answers lie in changing how we design, manufacture, and dispose of high tech electronics. Europe has led the way in regulating materials used in electronic devices and in e-waste recycling. But in the United States many have yet to recognize the persistent human health and environmental effects of the toxics in high tech devices. If "Silent Spring" brought national attention to the dangers of DDT and other pesticides, "High Tech Trash" could do the same for a new generation of technology's products.