Although France sending its nuclear waste to China may have made it into a paper, this kind of thing is nothing special for China. China has been importing the garbage of other countries for years. Usually countries pay to import items, but China is at times paid to act as the landfill for many OECD countries. I wrote a sloppy undergrad paper about the international trade in electronic waste (e-waste), and if you don't mind the poor grammar and poor formatting which my paper was subjected to, it is available for you to read on my long abandoned attemt and being intellectual and philosophical through analyzing the world. For proffesional information avaiable from the Worldwatch Institute and a particularly groundbreaking report titled Exporting Harm – The High Tech Trashing of Asia by the Basel Action Network.

I actually visited one of the center of e-waste processing during a trip when I was in China for my junior year. Although I lacked the resources (money, time, connections) that professional reporters and investigators had, it was still an amazing experience to see just how filthy the place was, and having read previously about the cancer and other side effects caused by exposure to that level of toxic chemicals (commonly found in computers) gave my experience a unique depth.

It was also during the writing of this paper that I began to really get into the idea of re-use of products. Imagine this: If after being used for a few years could be sent back to the company that made it. This company could take apart the components, use whatever is still usable, and dismantle and cannibalize whatever isn't usable in it's current form. For an even simpler concept imagine that the bottles that beverages come in could be returned to the local 7-11, where they would be filled with a new beverage and re-labeled for its new contents. Imagine that candy bars came in re-usable and returnable Tupperware-like containers rather than disposable plastic. *sigh* What a world.