Does Dry Cleaning Cause Cancer?

A shuttered dry cleaner. Daquella manera/Flickr

 

—By Kiera Butler

Rarely do I darken the doorstep of a dry cleaner. That's mainly because I am too cheap and lazy; I admit to having inflicted some verboten wash cycles on my few dry-clean-only dresses, followed by a sheepish line dry. The result is usually wrinkly but passable. I'm lucky: As you probably could have guessed, freshly-pressed suits are not the prevailing style at MoJo HQ. But I know plenty of people, especially men, who have to haul their collared shirts to the dry cleaner every week.

Unfortunately, all that dry cleaning takes a toll on the environment. The main reason is the chemical solvent that the vast majority of the nation's 34,000 dry cleaners use: tetrachloroethylene, or "perc" (short for another one of its names, perchloroethylene), which has found its way into soil, streams, and even drinking water. This month, in its first update on perc since 1988, the EPA officially identified it as a "likely human carcinogen." It also changed the chemical's reference dose—the amount of a substance considered to safe to ingest every day—from 0.01 miligrams per kilogram of body mass a day to 0.006 mg/kg, a decrease of 40 percent.

So are dry-cleaned clothes a health risk? The EPA focuses on the environmental effects of perc, emphasizing that it "does not believe that wearing clothes dry cleaned with perc will result in exposures which pose a risk of concern." But David Andrews, a senior scientist with the Environmental Working Group, still sees the practice as potentially risky. "We would still view that as an unnecessary exposure to a probable human carcinogen," he wrote in an email. "So to be cautious, we recommend avoiding conventional dry cleaners (not just for personal exposures, but for the environmental exposures that result from commercial use)."

The good news is that nontoxic dry cleaners are becoming easier to find. Most of them aren't technically "dry" at all; rather, they use liquids. A method called "wet cleaning" involves different water-based soaps and machine settings for various fabric types, while another uses liquid pressurized carbon dioxide. (Bonus: The CO₂ used in dry cleaning is typically captured as a byproduct from factories and plants, so it doesn't contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.) A third involves hydrocarbon-based solutions. Andrews considers wet cleaning and liquid CO₂ the most environmentally friendly options. Hydrocarbon solutions, he says, are "a step in the right direction"; a drawback, though, is that they are derived from petroleum.



I've found that my local green dry cleaners are a little more expensive than conventional cleaners, but this EPA report (PDF) says they shouldn't have to be: It found that wet cleaning can be economically competitive with dry cleaning, especially if the business doesn't try to do both. It's much more economical, according to the report, to specialize in wet-cleaning. The Federal Trade Commission is currently considering updating its requirements for garment care labels to include a "professional wet cleaning" option, which would be a major boon to the green cleaning industry.

Unfortunately, there's no widespread green-cleaning certification program yet, so your best bet as a consumer is to ask your local cleaners about their processes. You can also check out NRDC's handy and comprehensive guide to dry-cleaning alternatives here. Also take "dry clean only" labels with a grain of salt; Ecosalon has some tips on which fabrics are safe to wash at home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kiera Butler is the articles editor at Mother Jones.

New Study Finds that Rich People are More Likely to Lie and Cheat.

 

By Sarah Jaffe | Sourced from AlterNet

Bloomberg (yes, the same Bloomberg news outlet owned by multibillionaire New York City mayor, because you can't make this stuff up) reports that a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the "upper class"--their words--are more likely to behave unethically than those of us with less money.

Elizabeth Lopatto at Bloomberg wrote:

The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Taken together, the experiments suggest at least some wealthier people “perceive greed as positive and beneficial,” probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote.

Take candy from children? Really now, guys, shouldn't there be limits?

The tests used in the study ranged from studying video to see whether people obeyed traffic laws--those with more expensive cars were less likely to do so--to having people interview a potential job candidate for a short-term job. In the job-seeking case, the participants were told that the job would shortly be eliminated, but the wealthier participants were less likely to tell the candidate that the job wouldn't last.

One more test had participants playing a game in which a computer rolled dice for them, for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate. The wealthier participants once again were more likely to lie about their score, even though the prize was comparatively less to them.

“A $50 prize is a measly sum to people who make $250,000 a year,” one of the study authors told Bloomberg. “So why are they more inclined to cheat? For a person with lower socioeconomic status, that $50 would get you more, and the risks are small.”

If the rich are more likely to lie and cheat for a tiny prize, why do so many still have a hard time believing that the Wall Streeters who helped crash the economy knew that they were doing something wrong?

7 Dangerous Lies About Plastic.

Photo Credit: NOAA Photo Library: fish1968 by LCDR Eric Johnson, NOAA Corps.

 

 

 

AlterNet / ByStiv Wilson

 

Big Plastic is big money and survives regulatory scrutiny by creating big spin. Here's what you need to know.

 

To receive a Ph.D in industrial chemistry in the United States, no American university requires candidates to take even a single toxicology class as part of their course work. We churn out new chemists with the divine power to manipulate the very structure of nature itself, without teaching them the divine wisdom of how to wield that power.


Nearly everything we consume or even interact with these days is made of plastic. The industry that produces plastic, largely represented by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), has an annual budget of over $120 million to protect its interests. But as the plague of plastic that wreaks havoc on our environment slowly gains the attention of policymakers, concerned citizens and the media, the makers of plastic resins and the companies that package their products have become increasingly aggressive about defending their respective bottom lines.


Taking tactics from Big Tobacco's playbook, the industry engages in bully tactics, politician buys and wide-scale misinformation campaigns meant to confuse the public and turn truth to speculation. Big Plastic is big money and survives regulatory scrutiny by creating big spin.


Because of slashed budgets to regulatory agencies, little private-sector money for watchdogging industry, and a lazy mainstream press that simply regurgitates its claims, the petrochemical industry goes largely unchecked. Here are some of the biggest whoppers.


Lie #1: Plastics are safe.
To date, we use over 248,000 chemicals in commerce and we don't know which ones are harmful or safe. Why? Because the vast amount of research on plastics we use in our lives comes from the plastic industry.


Much of the plastic we see on a daily basis we know by its designated recycling numbers 1 through 7. These plastics are not pure; rather, they're a proprietary formulation of additives, some of which have been shown to be endocrine disrupters, carcinogenic and pose countless other health concerns, but very, very little data exists on additives, toxicologically speaking. In the United States, chemicals that make plastics are innocent until proven guilty, leaving the burden of proof of toxicity to the vastly underfunded and under-staffed Environmental Protection Agency. With 248,000 chemicals on the market, don't expect any light shed here anytime soon.


Perhaps the best-known additive is bisphenol-A, or BPA. Though it's gained media traction having been shown to cause sexual mutations, cardiovascular disorders, obesity, and diabetes, the $6 billion annual industry makes the plastics industry protect it fiercely, even though Centers for Disease Control studies have shown that 93 percent of the adult population has BPA present in their urine. BPA has been on the radar of environmentalists for years but few policy victories have been won because industry-funded studies repeatedly don't show adverse effects, though all the independent studies do.


Lie #2: The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch does not exist.
In a 25-page report for the Save the Bag Coalition, meant to refute claims made by the media and environmentalists about the presence of plastic in the ocean, attorney Stephen Joseph wrote that the "so-called 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch,' which is alleged to be twice the size of Texas, does not exist." To keep the speculation on the table, industry hammers on a single point; in early 2011, Oregon State University issued a press release titled, "Oceanic "Garbage Patch' Not Nearly As Big As Portrayed By Media" and a huge media storm ensued calling out environmentalists as a result.
Why this press release was so widely distributed is strange, because the woman who issued it isn't even a relevant name in the plastics research world. But seeing an opportunity to pound environmentalists, the plastic industry created a PR blitz sending press releases to media and form letters to lawmakers. What's interesting is that no one can attribute who first made the Texas-sized analogy, and no primary source for the quote exists, though it certainly went viral.


The researcher from OSU, Angelique White, is correct in her assessment from the best available data, but the data available isn't enough by several degrees of scale to accurately predict spatial distribution of plastics in the gyres (which any scientist who works on the issue will tell you, explicitly), or the ocean in general. To do so would mean that 70 percent of the surface of the earth surface had been sampled.


Well, that's not going to happen anytime soon, as research vessels cost about $30,000 a day and funding is very limited in this field, because so many corporate interests that might sponsor such research depend on plastic to deliver their products. What scientists do know is that 200 billion pounds of plastic are produced each year, and that number is on the rise, and mitigation strategies for keeping plastics out of the ocean are failing, horribly. Greenpeace estimates that of the 200 billion pounds produced annually, 10 percent makes it into the ocean.


To date, the best estimate of how much plastic is in the gyres comes from Columbia University. Researchers took all the major data sets (of which there are very, very few) that exist and calculated 73,878,000 pounds of plastic in the area of the gyres, which accounts for just 16 million of the earth's 315 million square kilometers of ocean surface.


Another problem with determining the scale of plastic pollution is that half of the plastics that are made sink and to date no data exists on how much plastic lies beneath the surface of the water. But when speaking only of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) water bottles, a type of plastic that sinks, we know that Americans alone discard 22 billion a year. Scientists who work on plastic in the ocean often refer to it as, "the world's largest dump." But without "conclusive" data, industry can stay on the offensive.


Lie #3: Plastics don't kill sea life or pose a threat to people eating fish.
While occasionally industry will acknowledge that marine animals do eat plastics from time to time, they make a point of stating that they don't know if the plastics are definitively responsible for the animal's death. To date, 177 species of marine life have been shown to ingest plastics and the number is likely to get much higher as more research is done. Recently published evidence has shown that shards of plastic eroded from synthetic clothing in the washing machine is so small that it can enter an animal at the cellular level.


But determining death, or eventual death of an animal based on a necropsy (autopsy for animals) is notoriously difficult in some cases. What's at issue is that again, industry takes advantage of the "unknowns" to make the assertion that their products don't cause morbidity. Scientists can't absolutely know what causes an animal's death unless it lives and dies in a controlled environment. But opening up a turtle stomach and finding pounds of plastic in it might give them a clue. How long would a turtle have survived with this much plastic garbage in his guts?


We know that most types of plastic aren't passed by a turtle and that it wreaks havoc on their digestive systems. We also know that carrying around a stomach full of plastic is going to slow him down and change his natural buoyancy. Sharper plastics, cause gut impaction and the potential for stomach wall and intestinal perforation. In the wild, everything about an animal's health and agility matters in determining his survival quotient.


In December, a study was published in Science Of The Total Environment that looked to see if the digestive juices of turtles could make plastic bags decay. Three common types of shopping bags (including bioplastic) were subjected to the gastrointestinal fluids of Green and Loggerheads turtles. Without exception, the ubiquitous High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) bag showed "negligible" biodegradability -- which means if a turtle can't pass it, he's stuck with it forever.


Beyond turtles, 9 percent of base food chain fish (which represents as much as 50 percent of the biomass of fish in the entire ocean) sampled in the North Pacific have been shown to ingest plastics, and along with it a toxic soup of PAHs, flame retardants, DDE (a persistent form of the outlawed DDT) and PCBs. Concentrations of these chemicals in ocean-borne plastics have been shown to be up to a million times higher than the ambient sea water around it.


Bigger fish eat the fish that eat these toxic bombs and so do humans at the top of the food chain. All humans have levels of these toxins in their blood and men can't get rid of them. Women can only pass the chemicals through the umbilical chord and through breast milk, and thus, a higher and higher chemical burden in the human body will result from generation to generation.


Lie #4: It shouldn't be called "plastic pollution" but rather "marine debris."
What's the most common type of plastic found on the surface of the ocean? According to the Ocean Conservancy's annual report, 11 percent of beach litter is plastic bags. But what happens when a plastic bag enters the ocean? Plastic doesn't biodegrade in any meaningful timeframe, but it photo-degrades. Thin, flimsy plastic like HDPE with a lot of surface area (like the common bag from grocery stores) photo-degrades faster than thicker plastic. Ultraviolet rays from the sun break the polymer chains of hydrocarbon molecules into smaller pieces and what you end up with is small fragments. So, you might not find a plastic bag in the "garbage patch" but you surely will find the remnants of them. Plastic bags are of the class of plastics recyclers refer to as "blow trash" as they tend to be picked up by the wind and blown out to sea. They're huge offenders of plastic pollution as Americans consume more than 100 billion a year.


Keith Christman, managing director for plastics markets at the ACC, maintained that "marine debris" is a better phrase than "plastic pollution" for describing the trash in the ocean even though 90 percent of the contents of the gyres is plastic. Christman, understanding the negative implications of his product's association with the word "pollution," mentioned that it's not just plastic, but derelict fishing gear as well. All modern fishing gear is made of polypropylene, i.e. plastic. This is a sore spot for the ACC, and marine plastics research and education groups that receive funding from the ACC are typically "mandated" to refer to oceanic trash as marine debris to keep the burden of guilt from resting squarely on their shoulders.


Lie #5: "Plastic retail carry-out bags are 100-percent recyclable and made from clean natural gas."
This is a direct statement issued by the American Progressive Bag Alliance to the city of Dana Point, California in a letter regarding a proposed bag ban. That plastic bags are 100 percent recyclable isn't the issue; it's that by and large, they are not recycled. Plastic bag recycling is governed by supply and demand. People assume that if they place a bag in a recycling receptacle this means the bag will in fact be recycled. That's not necessarily true. In order to show (very) modest positive trending in recycling, industry lops all polyethylene (PE) films, wraps and bags all into one category. But for bags discretely, which are high-density polyethylene, the numbers are atrocious. In 2009, the rate for recycling is 6.1 percent; in 2010, the rate is 4.3 percent.


Thus one of the main targets legislatively, is plastic shopping bags. The biggest player in the bag market, Hilex Poly, has become a master of spin tactics to attempt to paint a rosy picture of its business. Hilex, the largest recycler in the US, writes posts on its Web site patting itself on the back for increased recycling rates claiming that PE rates are up from 2009 to 2010. What it fails to mention is the distinction between the different types of PE, and that EPA itself doesn't independently audit the recycling industry, it just compiles industry's reporting.


There's another problem with plastic bag recyclability. According to Mark Daniels of Hilex Poly, only 30-percent post-consumer HDPE can be used to make a new bag, which means 70 percent of a "recycled" plastic bag comes from virgin sources (natural gas). Sometimes, recycled HDPE gets down-cycled into other products like decking materials. The problem here is that plastic decking materials have a lifespan as well, and no strategy for reclaiming them at the end of their lifespan has been introduced to the recycling markets.


When speaking of plastics in general (including plastic bags), even when there is a modest gain in recycling rates, those rates are far outpaced by higher consumption. From 2009 to 2010, plastics generated in the municipal waste stream jumped from 59,660,000 to 62,080,000 pounds. This is an increase of 2,420,000 pounds. In terms of recycling gains, the EPA reports 440,000 more pounds of all plastics recovered from 2009 to 2010.


So, if we subtract the increase in gains in recovery from the increase in generation we still get an increase of plastic generation of 1,980,000 pounds. This is the central conspiracy of the plastics industry tactically. If industry can convince the public that the environmental consequences of their consumption habits are offset by the industry-backed solution of recycling, industry is guaranteed that its bottom line will grow by hoodwinking the public into believing the myth of recycling.


What about natural gas, the stock for plastic bags? It is becoming scarcer and dirtier to get. According to the US Energy Information Administration, 35 percent of domestic natural gas drilling comes from fracking, and will reach 47 percent by 2035. Though natural gas burns cleaner than other fossil fuels, getting it out of the ground by fracking creates potent greenhouse gas emissions of methane and other undesired consequences. According to a congressional report released in April, the 14 biggest fracking companies released 3 billion liters of fracking fluid into the environment, including 29 chemicals known or suspected to be carcinogenic to humans. This is where your plastic bag comes from -- or at least 70 pecent of it.


Lie #6: Reusable bags are dangerous.
The American Chemistry Council is worried that Americans might not understand the danger of things when they get dirty. Like your underwear, if you don't wash your reusable bag, bacteria might grow in it. So, rather than issue a press release telling people to wash their bags, they funded a study looking at bacterial contamination of reusable bags.


Bacteria are myriad on everything we touch, but the presence of bacteria is natural and the microbe kingdom has a pretty good system of checks and balances. The study found that 12 percent of its 84-bag sample size found E. coli, and all samples but one contained bacteria. This finding spawned scary headlines in newspapers such as the Washington Post that read "Reusable Bags Found To Be Full Of Bacteria." But here's the problem: None of the bacteria (salmonella and listeria were not found), or the strains of E. coli present in reusable bags are harmful to humans.


The ACC, though absolutely knowing this, still went ahead on a PR blitz trying to scare the hell out of people about bacterial exposure. Thankfully, the study was officially debunked by Consumer Reports. My favorite bit from the article comes from a senior staff scientist at Consumer Reports, who said, "A person eating an average bag of salad greens gets more exposure to these bacteria than if they had licked the insides of the dirtiest bag from this study."


Lie #7: We care about polar bears and recycling.
Coca-Cola is one the world's largest producers of plastic waste. Coke creates cause marketing campaigns with corporate-aligned NGOs like World Wildlife Fund which is working with the Canadian government to to find an area of ice that can withstand climate change to create a sort of polar bear refuge, hoping to save the white bears from drowning because Artic ice is melting.
In total, Coke has pledged $2 million and another $1 million matching funds to consumer donations. What's ironic is that Coke uses a plastic bottle for much of its product's packaging and one-third of the volume of a plastic Coke bottle is what it takes to produce it from oil, and another third is what it takes to transport it to market. That's a lot of fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuel burning that melts polar ice that kills polar bears.


But perhaps the most egregious offense is that Coke vehemently opposes the only program proven to reduce its bottles' impact on the environment: bottle bills. Statistically, for states that have bottle deposits, the recovery rates for recycling are off the charts compared to those that don't. In California, recovery rates top 70 percent for PET bottles.


So what's a citizen to do? Unfortunately, cutting through the spin is a difficult task, but as always, when there is a lot of money to be had, injecting oneself with a healthy does of skepticism about the intentions of chemical companies that manipulate nature for profit is a good start. What's the best solution? Remember this: if you don't consume it in the first place, it can't damage you or the environment.


Avoiding plastics is not just a personal responsibility, it's an environmental mandate and should be as common in our global society as turning off the lights when you leave the room. There is no silver bullet solution to plastic pollution, more like a silver buckshot, but it all starts with you saying two words: "No Plastic."
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Stiv Wilson is a freelance journalist and communications and policy director for the 5 Gyres Institute, a global NGO working on plastic and chemical pollution in the world's oceans and watersheds.

13 Great New Political Movies You Should Watch For.

Gay pride 1987, still from David France's "How to Survive a Plague"

Photo Credit: http://www.facebook.com/howtosurviveaplague

 

AlterNet / ByJulianne Escobedo Shepherd

 

As the major festival circuit begins, the big political doc titles emerge. Here are some of our favorites.

 

While the Oscars are often praised for bringing greater attention to political documentaries like Inside Job and Gasland, the Sundance Film Festival is where it begins. Something of a feeder fest, it plucks smaller features (and shorts!) and sets them on the path to more mainstream, commercial audiences, which benefits both filmmakers and the causes they seek to illuminate. In the mid-2000s, it was certainly lambasted for leaning too Hollywood — and fostering a Cannes-like celebrity atmosphere that distracted from its initial goal of helping independent films — but in recent years, festival directors have tried to rectify that, adding different programs, such as “Focus on Film,” that mean to bring it back to earth. Last year, Gasland, Restrepo, and Waiting for Superman all hit Sundance before they were nominated for Oscars (Restrepo won).

The entries for next year’s Sundance were just announced, and typically there are a lot of great-sounding films on the roster. But more than in recent memory, the documentary selections are incredibly politically relevant — particularly in the economic area — with several focusing on topics that came to light this year, including the Fukushima nuclear plant and Occupy Wall Street. (Many of them, it should be noted, are directed by women.) This year’s roster got Indie Wire thinking ahead, wondering, “Will Sundance 2012 Docs Influence the Debate on Poverty, Hunger, Economic Equality?” It’s not a lofty projection — we saw how last year’s big docs brought important topics like short-shrifted education and oil greed to the forefront. Here’s a list of those documentaries, both American and international, that could shift this year’s thinking, and the ones we most want to see get awesome distribution deals.

1. We’re Not Broke (dir. Karin Hayes, Victoria Bruce)
And, we have our first Occupy Wall Street–related film. The directors have collaborated together before on a few award-winning pieces, including The Kidnapping of Ingrid Betancourt, which detailed the harrowing experience of the title subject, a Colombian presidential candidate who was held hostage by FARC for over six years. This one brings it closer to home, looking at the effects of corporations’ immoral overseas tax havens as average Americans struggle for their homes and lives. It’s not out officially until 2012, so there aren’t too many details beyond that bit of information and a few stills featuring OWS protesters, though it will allegedly feature US Uncut and focus on corporate tax evasion.

2. Detropia (dir. Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady)
Calling Detroit “the canary in the coal mine,” the filmmakers focus on the city’s loss of both manufacturing jobs (50 percent) and population (25 percent), and how its denizens are struggling to stay in a city on the verge of bankruptcy. Through it, they posit that Detroit is only the beginning, and that other major cities will follow as the “American dream” becomes a nightmare. Ewing and Grady, who were nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for Jesus Camp, follow the fates of several Detroiters who are holding on for dear life while trying to imagine some future of urban renewal. This film will debut at Sundance, but with Detroit’s mayor currently struggling to keep the city from the clutches of the state's nefarious emergency takeover laws, expect this topic and the city to stay in the news for 2012.

3. Finding North (dir. Kristi Jacobson, Lori Silverbush)
This piece about who goes hungry in America and why looks like it might be a game changer in the style of Waiting for Superman: having gotten a hearty cosign by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Finding North seems to posit a “return to policies of the 1970s” in order to remove the burden, and it also focuses on those hit hardest by the lack of access to affordable, healthy food: one in four children. Following three individuals affected, including a second-grader in Colorado and a third-grader in Mississippi, the film tries to shed light both on the impact of hunger for America’s future and why it’s even happening at all. Music fan bonus: The original soundtrack is performed by T-Bone Burnett and the Civil Wars.

4. The Queen of Versailles (dir. Lauren Greenfield)
Alluding to the obscenely opulent French monarch whose head was eventually lopped, Greenfield’s doc focuses on a very real, almost too perfect story of excess and economy. A billionaire family of real-estate magnates aspires to build the biggest house in America — a 90,000-square-foot abode modeled after Versailles — when the very boom and bubble that funded their project pops and stymies their dreams. Foreclosure is the guillotine in this tragedy. Filmed by an award-winning documentary photographer, the stills are compelling and the tale more so.

5. Payback (dir. Jennifer Baichwal)
Margaret Atwood’s best-selling book of the same name was the inspiration for this Canadian documentary, which focuses on the historical, cultural, and social impact of debt through the ages, and how it is, in her words, an “innate part of the human experience.” Of course, global economic meltdown is the locus of the film, which means expect plenty of Atwood’s “shadow side of wealth,” emphasis on the shadow. The film will premiere at Sundance, but to get a jump-start, listen to Atwood’s Massey lectures here, which provided the foundation for the book and, in turn, the doc.

6. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare (dir. Matthew Heineman, Susan Froemke)
Most of the films on this list are so new they don’t even have trailers, but the one with the most self-explanatory title does. The film features the dramatic exchange between President Obama and a hostile Republican Congress in the administration’s efforts to get Americans health care, of course, but goes deeper into the lobbyists and corporate powers whose pockets thrive on keeping people sick. Big pharma’s a target — and the burdened American is the victim. Escape Fire’s not finished yet and needs a big boost of funds to have it ready for Sundance. To help, donate on their Kickstarter account.

7. How to Survive a Plague (dir. David France)
The director, an award-winning journalist and chronicler of AIDS activism, pieced together never-before-seen archival footage of AIDS activists in the ’80s and ’90s, including ACT UP and the Lavender Hill Mob, to show how HIV went from a certain death sentence to what’s considered a manageable chronic disease by actually infiltrating government and pharmaceutical agencies. Rogue lifesavers! Not only that, he shows how these activists, many of them HIV-positive, broke down the social stigmas that followed the infection. Heartbreaking tagline: “They saved millions of lives — including many, though not all, of their own.” Naturally, the doc also looks at the fact that HIV infection is on the rise, most prominently, tragically, among young gay men.

8. The House I Live In (dir. Eugene Jarecki)
An examination of how the War on Drugs has decimated America’s impoverished communities and become the chief feeder into the prison industrial complex — while drugs flourish. Information beyond that is sparse, but Jarecki’s an accomplished and acclaimed director, responsible for Why We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger, and Freakonomics.

9. The Invisible War (dir. Kirby Dick)
Female soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to be raped by fellow soldiers than to be killed by enemy fire. Director Kirby Dick, whose 2005 documentary Twist of Faith focused on a man’s sexual abuse at the hands of a Catholic priest, delves into the social and political implications of this travesty, and the fact that it’s often covered up. The trailer features women who’ve been assaulted speaking about their experiences and shows what promises to be a tight, gripping investigation.

10. 1½ Revolution (dir. Omar Shargawi, Karim El Hakim)
As Tahrir Square erupted in revolution, the directors of this film were serendipitously in Cairo on another assignment. They ended up capturing footage that evaded most of the mainstream news media, intermingling with the military, taking the psychological gauge from street level — and were eventually arrested and beaten by the secret police. As one of this year’s most extraordinary world developments — and the zygote of the Arab Spring — the film’s view from the ground appears to be some of the best, and most real, footage to date.

11. 5 Broken Cameras (dir. Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi)
A Palestininan villager — codirector Emad Burnat — chronicles the change in his community after his son is born, depicting an ever-encroaching barrier being erected by the Israeli military. “I had never thought of making films,” says Burnat in the trailer, “but when I started filming, I thought maybe there is a way to change the situation in which I live.” It’s a document of five years — a new camera per year — of settlements, and violence, in a once-peaceful enclave.

12. The Atomic States of America (dir. Don Argott, Sheena M. Joyce)
Before Fukushima was rocked by the massive Japan earthquake of early 2011 — before they started finding radiation in baby food — the United States approved the construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant in 32 years. This film explores communities located near plants, looks at the subsequent debate, and wonders whether it’s too risky. It premieres at Sundance, but early screenshots depict a stunning and terrifying American landscape marred by nuclear power plants situated dangerously close to where Americans live and work.

13. Chasing Ice (dir. Jeff Orlowski)
Climate change deniers will have no recourse against this one, which features time-lapse photography by National Geographic’s James Balog, documenting the receding of ancient Arctic glaciers over mere years. It also chronicles Balog’s own shift from a climate change skeptic to a passionate voice for the proof of its existence. He risks his life to place his special time-lapse cameras all over the Arctic, with a singular mind to provide evidence that global warming is all too real. (Feeling skeptical? Here’s Balog’s TED Talk.) Of note: This film’s writer, Mark Monroe, was also responsible for the devastating dolphin conservation documentary The Cove. With the recent debate over Discovery Channel’s now-rescinded censorship over airing the terrifying, climate change–related finale of Frozen Planet, it’s clear that even the environmental community needs convincing, particularly since the rate of acceleration makes this something like Al Gore 5.0.


Sundance begins Jan. 19 in Park City, Utah. These films are generally made available shortly after screening, and most entrants usually get picked up for distro deals. Keep your eyes peeled.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, the New York Times and various other magazines and websites.

Toxic Chemical Being Sold as a Health-Conscious Sweetener.

 

From: http://www.anh-usa.org/toxic-chemical-being-sold-as-a-health-conscious-sweetener/

Splenda Essentials pretend to be health-supporting, when in fact they seem to have more in common with pesticides than with sugar.


Sucralose, sold under the brand name Splenda, is simply chlorinated sugar; in chemical terms, it is a chlorocarbon. The idea behind this is that the body would no longer recognize it as sugar. But, as Johns Hopkins-trained physician and biochemist James Bowen, MD, points out, chlorine is “nature’s Doberman attack dog—a highly excitable, ferocious atomic element employed as a biocide in bleach, disinfectants, insecticide, WWI poison gas and hydrochloric acid.” Common chlorocarbons include chlordane and DDT, a product so harmful that it is now banned for agricultural use the world over.


Now Splenda is selling a product called Splenda Essentials. Different formulations contain B vitamins, antioxidants (vitamins C and E), or fiber. The marketing and advertising appear to be targeting health-conscious people who are interested in vitamins and nutrition—despite the fact that Splenda is highly toxic and has no place in a healthy diet.


Splenda’s advertising says the addition of B1, B5, and B6 “help support a healthy metabolism.” The antioxidant product “contains vitamin C and E, like those found in fruits and vegetables,” while the fiber product is touted as containing “one gram of healthy fiber.” It is worth noting that the regular Splenda product already contains fiber—the powdery dextrose and/or maltodextrin that forms the carrier for the sweetener—but only between 0.5 and 1.0 grams of it. For the fiber product, they bumped it up an even 1.0 grams. Whoopee.


For the vitamins, Splenda has added 20% of the recommended daily allowance; for the fiber, they’ve added 0.03% of the RDA. But let’s compare those amounts with the recommendations from the late scientist, researcher, and physician Dr. Emanuel Cheraskin of the International Academy of Science:

	B1	B5	B6	C	E	Fiber
RDA	1.2 mg	5 mg	15 mg	85 mg	15 mg (22.35 IU)	32 mg
Amount per packet	0.24 mg	1 mg	3 mg	17 mg	4.5 IU	1 mg
Cheraskin	25 mg	100–200 mg	25 mg	1,000 mg	450 IU

With the minute amounts of nutrients per packet, one would need to be consuming unconscionable numbers of packets to make any impact at all on one’s health—that is, provided one weren’t also consuming the sucralose itself! As we noted last year, Splenda alters the microflora in the intestine and “exerts numerous adverse effects,” according to a Duke University study, including an increase in body weight (not quite what a “diet aid” is supposed to do!) and an elevation of liver enzymes, which hurts the bioavailability of nutrients.


In “The Lethal Science of Splenda, a Poisonous Chlorocarbon,” Dr. Bowen says that “any chlorocarbons not directly excreted from the body intact can cause immense damage to the processes of human metabolism and, eventually, our internal organs. The liver is a detoxification organ which deals with ingested poisons. Chlorocarbons damage the hepatocytes, the liver’s metabolic cells, and destroy them.”


Dr. Bowen notes that the high solvency of chlorocarbons like Splenda attacks the human nervous system and can produce cancer, birth defects, and immune system destruction. In test animals, Splenda produced swollen livers (as do all chlorocarbon poisons), calcified their kidneys, shrunk their thymus glands (the biological seat of immunity) and produced liver inflammation.


Our colleagues at ANH-Europe point out other adverse effects in animals as a result of sucralose ingestion: DNA damage in gastrointestinal organs, increase in the number of normal cells in the surface tissue of the kidney, hemorrhagic degeneration of the adrenal cortex (which regulates carbohydrate and fat metabolism, salt, and water balance), incidence of cataracts, marked gastrointestinal disturbance, and deaths in pregnant rabbits and aborted rabbit fetuses. Splenda’s adverse effects in humans include headaches and migraines and a long list of consumer-reported side effects including skin rashes/flushing, panic-like agitation, dizziness and numbness, diarrhea, swelling, muscle aches, intestinal cramping, bladder issues, and stomach pain.


Splenda has replaced aspartame as the number one artificial sweetener in foods and beverages; aspartame’s popularity declined after the public learned that that it is both a neurotoxin and an underlying cause of chronic illness. As Dr. Bowen warns, “We should not be fooled again into accepting the safety of a toxic chemical on the blessing of the FDA and saturation advertising. In terms of potential long-term human toxicity we should regard sucralose with its chemical cousin DDT, the insecticide now outlawed because of its horrendous long term toxicities at even minute trace levels in human, avian, and mammalian tissues.”


ANH-USA is filing a citizen petition with the Federal Trade Commission regarding Splenda’s deceptive advertising. Splenda’s online marketing includes a series of YouTube videos called Splenda Essential Choices for Healthy Living, which features an ADA-certified Registered Dietitian giving people health advice—though we might call it “natural health lite”—including prominent endorsements of Splenda Essentials. Their marketing clearly targets health-conscious people interested in nutrition, while trying

Have Bees Become Canaries In the Coal Mine? Why Massive Bee Dieoffs May Be a Warning About Our Own Health.

AlterNet / ByJill Richardson

 

What scientists are beginning to understand about the cause of colony collapse could be a message for all of us.

It's often said that we have bees to thank for one out of every three bites we take of food. In addition to producing honey, honeybees literally criss-cross the United States, pollinating almonds, oranges, melons, blueberries, pumpkins, apples, and more. And while carrots are a biennial root crop that are harvested long before they flower, all carrots are planted from seed, and honeybees pollinate the carrot flowers that produce the seeds. Other species of bees, both social and solitary bees, pollinate other crops. And the populations of all these species of bees are in decline.

The decline of bees has been in the headlines for several years, and theories to explain their deaths abound. But perhaps there is not just one single cause. University of California San Diego professor of biology James Nieh studies foraging, communication and health of bees. "I would say it's a combination of four factors; pesticides, disease, parasites, and human mismanagement," says Nieh. Bees might be weakened by having a very low level of exposure to insecticides or fungicides, making them more susceptible if they are attacked by viruses or parasites. "It's kind of like taking a patient who is not doing so well -- very weak, poor diet, exposing them to pathogens, and then throwing more things at them. It's not surprising that honeybees are not very healthy."

One class of pesticides, neonicotinoids in particular has received a lot of attention for harming bees. In late 2010, the EPA came under fire from beekeepers and pesticide watchdog organizations. This happened when Colorado beekeeper Tom Theobald spoke out about how the EPA allowed clothianidin to be used without any proof it was safe and despite the fact that the EPA's own scientists believed it "has the potential for toxic risk to honey bees, as well as other pollinators."

At that time Theobald had reported losing up to 40 percent of his bees, and now, things are looking even worse. "As a business, I think it's over," he says. "I think my business is no longer viable. I'll continue to keep bees as best I can and may be able to pull off a halfway decent crop for another year or two but the trendline is down and over the edge of a cliff and that's typical of what's going on nationally."

A recently published study sheds a little more light on the impact of clothianidin. The study, which focuses on pesticide exposure in bees, looks at two pesticides that are used by treating seeds prior to planting. Each corn seed contains enough pesticide to kill 80,000 honeybees. Once the plant develops, all parts of the plant -- including the pollen collected by bees -- contain lower doses of the pesticide. One of the main revelations of the study is that bees get a hefty dose of these pesticides, clothianidin and thiamethoxam, during spring planting as the seeds are coated in talc to keep them from sticking together and then much of the talc enters the environment either with the seed or behind the planter through its exhaust fan.

The study found the pesticides on the soil of fields -- even unplanted fields -- and on nearby weeds, as well as in dead honeybees and in pollen collected by honeybees. Clothianidin is used on both corn and canola in the U.S., and while corn does not rely on honeybees for pollination (it is wind pollinated), the study found that "maize pollen comprised over 50 percent of the pollen collected by bees, by volume, in 10 of 20 samples."

Tucked in the middle of the study is a bombshell: "The levels of clothianidin in bee-collected pollen [from treated maize] that we found are approximately 10-fold higher than reported from experiments conducted in canola grown from clothianidin-treated seed."

This is significant because the pesticide clothianidin was deemed safe to bees by the EPA following a study of bees exposed to treated canola, a minor crop in the United States. However, according to the study, the pesticide dose bees are exposed to in the U.S. is usually ten times that, as corn (maize) covers more than 137,000 square miles in the U.S. -- an area larger than the state of New Mexico. So even though bees aren't pollinating corn directly, they still may be getting a toxic dose of pesticides from it.

To beekeepers, the news is not terribly surprising. Beekeeper Dave Hackenberg says, "You talk to more and more beekeepers across the country that don't really understand what's going on that are losing bees in the spring of the year when nobody's really spraying. You ask if there's corn there, and yeah, there's corn everywhere."

Hackenberg, a commercial beekeeper with 3,000 hives, somewhat unwittingly alerted the world to the mass deaths of bees after suffering major losses of his own bees in November 2006. "We were knocking our heads out trying to figure out what went wrong," he recalls. First he checked the hives for mites but found none. He called in experts from Penn State, who worked day and night, combing through the hives, and taking all kinds of samples. "Within four or five days they said 'We're finding stuff we've never seen before and you definitely don't have the virus we were looking for.' They saw paralysis in the bees, crystallization in their intestines, things that nobody had seen before, but nobody looked probably."

Several months later, Hackenberg's troubles were written up in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Within two days, his story appeared in 487 newspapers around the world. Hackenberg says that, for beekeepers, "Somebody changed the rules and forgot to tell us."

In addition to pesticides and diseases, using bees to pollinate monocultures and moving the bees around the country might be factors in their decline. Just as a person needs a varied diet, so do bees. According to Nieh, moving bees (as beekeepers like Hackenberg do several times a year) may cause them to lose some adult foragers. Bees begin their adult lives as nurse bees, become guard bees, and then spend the last few weeks of their lives as foragers. "Adult foragers learn where their home is based on solar and landscape cues." When they move, the adult foragers may leave the colony to gather honey and be unable to find their way home. "This may not be too difficult for the hive to weather, but it's just one more thing for an already weak colony," says Nieh. "The loss of a certain number of bees would not normally be fatal to the colony, but would not be good for a weakened colony."

"Monoculture and a homogeneous diet could be harmful, but the main thing is that bees are exposed to what we spray on crops, including fungicides that can harm bees because they have synergistic effects with insecticides and other toxins," says Nieh. "These factors are all combining in unexpected ways."
Nieh's research found that a very low dose of the pesticide imidacloprid, a relative of clothianidin that came onto the market in the mid-1990s, makes bees become, in essence, pickier eaters. "We find that it changes the sugar preferences of bees so that bees which previously would have accepted sugar solutions or nectars that were not very sweet, now will only feed at nectars that are much sweeter. And this is a problem because the amount of nectar out there that is very sweet is relatively limited. There is far more availability of nectar that has lower sugar concentrations ... Overall, this results in fewer calories flowing into the colony."

Hackenberg isn't doing as poorly as he was several years ago, but he attributes that to feeding the bees protein and supplements like brewers yeast and eggs and "kicking them in the pants with all kinds of nutrition because what they are gathering out there in nature is not what it's supposed to be." Hackenberg says, "We -- America or the world -- has messed up the bees' diet. Not only the bees' diet but everyone else's diet. We just don't have the nutrition that's out there in the food and bees are telling us this because what they are bringing home -- they can't make it anymore. We're supplementing them... and the bees are eating it... But go back 10-15 years ago, we didn't need this stuff."

A key question is whether the problem is simply a laundry list of unrelated factors (i.e. pesticides, disease, parasites, etc.) or whether those factors interact synergistically to kill bees. For example, does a sub-lethal dose of a relatively new pesticide make bees susceptible to die from a disease they would normally be able to recover from? This is important because it impacts the way the EPA should handle regulation of pesticides. If pesticides kill some bees, but parasites or diseases kill others, then the EPA's role is to merely ensure that the doses of pesticides used are low enough that they don't kill bees while scientists do their best to uncover how to treat parasites and disease. However, if low doses of pesticides weaken bees, making them susceptible to death by other causes (just like AIDS makes a patient susceptible to diseases that would not kill a healthy person), then the EPA will need to take more action.

Beekeepers see their bees as the canaries in the coal mine. All living beings are exposed to the cocktail of pesticides and other chemicals in our midst, each in sub-lethal doses but all mixing together and interacting in our bodies. Many Americans, like bees used to pollinate monocultures, do not eat very healthy or nutritious diets, and our stressful and sedentary lifestyles put us at even more risk of succumbing to illness. Are the bees giving us a message we should be heeding?

Dr. Nieh suggests that large growers could keep their own bees to give them "skin in the game." Currently, he says, one "focus is how much do I have to pay this year to rent honeybee colonies." If farmers kept their own bees, they would be "really invested in keeping these colonies healthy because these are the colonies that are pollinating their cash crop." Additionally, reducing the movement of bees around the country would slow the spread of diseases.

Nieh also sees a potential conflict of interest in the way that pesticides are approved by the EPA. "The approval process of pesticides would benefit from greater transparency and probably should undergo a more rigorous review process than it has in the past," he says. "It is a problem to require someone, a company like Bayer that has a vested interest in the approval, to pay for studies to show their pesticide is harmless."

For average Americans, in addition to eating foods grown without the use of pesticides, there are easy ways to support bees -- both honeybees and native bees. To attract and nourish pollinators, plant flowers in varieties of shapes, sizes and colors. Native plants are the best to attract native species of bees. Plant flowers in clumps instead of singly or in rows, and be sure that there is something blooming at all times during the year (at least, when your yard or garden is not covered in snow). Bees also need a water source, preferably shallow water so they will not drown. For more advice, visit the Xerces Society website.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..

The Dark Side of Chocolate: What Our Love Affair With Cocoa Means for the World.

 Truffles from Posh Chocolat

Photo Credit: Ari LeVaux

 

AlterNet / ByAri LeVaux

 

 

 

In addition to labor issues, chocolate plantations can be responsible for deforestation. But it can also be empowering to farmers and relatively healthy for the environment.       

 

Valentine's Day is the chocolate industry's holiday season. With an eye toward this February's annual love-fest, the International Labor Rights Forum purchased an advertising slot on a jumbotron outside the Super Bowl's Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis on which to broadcast a video called "Hershey's Chocolate, Kissed by Child Labor."

Africa produces 70 percent of the world's cocoa -- much of it with the region's infamously cheap labor. "In West Africa, where Hershey's sources much of its cocoa, over 200,000 children are forced to harvest cocoa beans every year," said Judy Gearhart, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum, via a press release.

On the day the Super Bowl ad was announced, Hershey's released a statement detailing steps it would take toward improving labor and sustainability practices, including a $10 million investment in its West African suppliers. That was enough to buy the company a temporary reprieve from the ILRF.
"Hershey's pledged to take the first step to address rampant forced and child labor in its supply chain," said Sean Rudolph, ILRF's campaigns director, "so we decided to pull the ad as a gesture of good faith."

The scuffle highlights the dark side of a food that, like love, can be bitter or sweet. In addition to labor issues, chocolate plantations can be responsible for deforestation, when growers raze rainforest to plant more cocoa trees.

But chocolate production can also be empowering to farmers and relatively healthy for the environment. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit some cocoa producers in Brazil that demonstrate the potential of chocolate to create positive change.

Like coffee, chocolate trees can be grown beneath the forest canopy instead of replacing it. In the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil this cultivation strategy is called cabruca. Also sometimes called "chocolate rainforests," cabrucas are composed of shade-tolerant cacao trees grown under a forest canopy. Leaf litter is allowed to build up on the forest floor, and a diverse ecosystem of plants and insects develops. Cabrucas can include other cash crops like rubber trees, cassava, and banana, papaya, and other fruit trees.

The cabrucas I visited are a far cry from the monoculture-style chocolate plantations that dominate the chocolate industry. Many such plantations have failed in recent years thanks to nutrient depletion and the spread of a plant disease called Witch's Broom. The cabrucas have shown dramatically more resistance to these problems. One grower I visited, a Swiss expat named Ernst Goetsch, has made good business of buying depleted and abandoned chocolate monoculture plantations and converting them into vibrant cabrucas. He's managed to employ many local people and restore value to previously worthless land, while producing a lot of chocolate.

In addition to the environmental benefits, the cabruca system offers a solution to the labor problems often associated with chocolate. The cacao plant is extremely responsive to tender loving care like pruning, mulching and amendments with compost. On a small scale, given lots of love, cocoa yields can more than double. This makes it a viable cash crop for small landholders, especially when you consider the other valuable grown alongside the chocolate plants.

There's a Brazilian agricultural cooperative called Cabruca that helps sustainable, fair trade chocolate growers, large and small, grow their crop and market their beans to companies like Valrhona, in France, or the Swiss chocolatier Laederach. Be prepared to pay more for the conscience-soothing options, and expect a better-tasting product. The Cabruca cooperative also sells wine made from the fruit of the cacao plant (chocolate is made from the seeds).

While the term cabruca is used only in Brazil, the concept of rainforest-friendly chocolate has taken root to some degree wherever chocolate is grown, even in West Africa. As part of Hershey's new commitment to fair-trade and sustainably grown chocolate, the company's Bliss and Dagoba lines will soon be sourced exclusively from Rainforest-Alliance certified operations. The change is due in part to pressure from groups like the International Labor Rights Forum, and in part to chase profit; artisanal chocolate is one of the fastest growing segments of the food business.

"Every time there's a new trade show we see new faces," Jason Willenbrock of Posh Chocolat in Missoula, Montana, told me. When he and his wife Ana opened shop seven years ago, they were the only chocolatiers in Montana. Now there are more than a dozen.

Willenbrock says they considered riding the "bean to bar" wave, where producers make products from "single origin" cacao from a specific region or even a specific plantation or cabruca. Single-origin chocolate is the equivalent of "varietal" wines, made from a single type of grape grown in one place.
As with wine, blended chocolates will often top single origin products in taste, and blending is where experts like Culinary Institute of America-trained Willenbrock have an edge. He describes chocolate in terms like "buttery or chalky mouthfeel," and notes the complex terroir of cacao grown in diverse systems like cabrucas.

Chocolate is an industry rife with stories, and stories -- like rainforest friendly labels -- sell product, even if they're plain wrong, says Willenbrock, who cites the fame of Belgian chocolate as an example. "This time of year, everyone wants to make chocolate fondue. And for some reason many of the recipes call for Belgian chocolate," Willenbrock told me. He says when Valentine's Day rolls around he has to brace for the annual onslaught of fondue makers looking for Belgian chocolate.

It's frustrating, he says, because Belgian chocolate makers tend to be "among the worst" of the Africa-sourcing chocolate makers, in terms of environmental and labor practices, and also in terms of quality. "There's absolutely no reason to choose Belgian chocolate, for fondue or anything else," he said.

Recipe: Jason Willenbrock's (non-Belgian) chocolate fondue 1 1/4 cup heavy cream
6 oz chopped chocolate (Prefers South American origin chocolates in the 65% range)
1 oz cognac or brandy
Sponge cake squares or strawberries for dipping
In a heavy bottom pot slowly bring cream to simmer. Slowly incorporate the chopped chocolate by whisking in a little at a time until it melts completely. Whisk in the cognac and keep it warm. Serve immediately with sponge cake squares or strawberries.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ari LeVaux writes a syndicated weekly food column, Flash in the Pan.

Inside Apple's Hidden Factories. Part 2.

 

—By Kiera Butler

Almost everyone I know owns something made by Apple, and while most of us spend a fair bit of time obsessing about our gadgets—which apps are worth paying for? Is Siri useful or annoying?—rarely do we talk about where they came from. In part, that's because Apple wants it that way: The company is famously tight-lipped about its manufacturing process, and few outsiders have ever made it into their factories.

But now, Apple's tough facade has finally begun to crack: Recent coverage (more on this below) has provided a glimpse into Apple's vast supply chain and the massive profits it produces—more than $400,000 for every employee, according to a New York Times investigation. Here at Mother Jones, we've got a somewhat related investigation in the pipeline—come back in a few weeks for the details. Meanwhile, my colleague Dave Gilson made this handy tool.

We've loaded this iPhone up with 10 apps you won't find on a real smart phone. Click on an app to learn where your phone's electronic components really came from.

Supply Side

Apple spends an estimated $100 on the iPhone's 1,000-plus parts. It keeps a tight lid on where in the world they come from. If you deconstruct the gadget, you'll find fewer than 130 parts with a brand name or "made in" label on them.

 

Bad Apples

iPhones are made in Shenzhen, China, by the Taiwanese company Foxconn, which has been criticized for its working conditions, including long hours, harsh discipline, and a rash of worker suicides. Apple's own reviews found that more than half its audited manufacturers did not meet its labor standards for things such as child labor.

 

Miner Threat

A 16GB iPhone 3GS contains 12 gold-plated parts. Producing 1 ounce of gold creates 80 tons of waste. Layers of middlemen make it difficult to trace the source of the gold (or any other metal) in an iPhone, making it easy for minerals from conflict zones to slip into the supply chain.

 

Tantalized

The iPhone includes a tantalum capacitor. After a United Nations report linked its manufacturer, Kemet, to the illegal mineral trade in eastern Congo, the company vaguely announced it "supports avoiding" tantalum from the region.

 

Negative Charge

Rechargeable batteries have energized demand for lithium. Getting more will mean digging up 3,000 square miles of pristine Bolivian salt flats, home to one-half of the world's lithium reserves.

 

Tin Soldiers

Tin is used to solder circuit boards. Some 27,000 tons are extracted from Congo annually, earning armed groups an estimated $93 million or more.

 

Screen Slaver

The 3.5-inch LCD screen is reportedly made in Taiwan and China by Wintek, which has faced allegations of low wages, forced overtime, and ripping off migrant workers.

 

BadVibes

High-density tungsten is used to make cell phones vibrate. Three-quarters of the world's supply comes from China—not known for its mining safety record—and 1,400 tons are dug up annually in Congo.

 

MicroPolluter

Making a 0.07-ounce microchip uses 66 pounds of materials, including water and toxic chemicals such as flame retardants and chlorinated solvents. Greenpeace gives Apple a 4.6 out of 10 for its efforts to eliminate hazardous chemicals and minimize e-waste.

 

Locked In

The list price for a 16GB iPhone 4S is $649. It's yours for less than $200, if you don't mind being locked into a two-year contract with AT&T or Verizon.

This week, the New York Times has launched a series called "The iEconomy," and the first piece in the series focused on Apple's massive outsourcing of jobs to China. No task is too big, no deadline too tight:

One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

Another article focused on the "harsh conditions" at the Chinese factories where Apple gadgets are made.

A few weeks back, there was an incredible episode of This American Life, wherein Mike Daisey, a monologist and "self-described worshipper in the cult of Mac" visits the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where iPads are made. What he finds there is mind-boggling. First, the sheer size of the place: 34,000 workers. The cafeterias seat thousands, and the dormitories are so crowded the beds remind Daisey of coffins.

Daisey meets a young woman who cleans iPad screens and discovers that she is just 13. While he is there, a worker dies after a 34-hour shift. But the most chilling part was Daisey's description of the factories as virtually silent. There's no thrum of machinery, he realizes, because there are hardly any machines. What we miss when we wax nostalgic about a time when things were made by hand, he says, is that "There are more handmade things now than there have ever been."

More bad news: Back in August, the Chinese NGO Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs released a report (PDF) on the pollution created by Apple's sprawling supply chain. Among its findings was that Apple doesn't even seem to be looking for environmental problems during its factory audits:

…the coalition has discovered more than 27 suspected suppliers to Apple that have had environmental problems. However, in the '2011 Supplier Responsibility Report' published by Apple Inc., where core violations were discovered from the 36 audits, not a single violation was based on environmental pollution…Therefore, despite Apple’s seemingly rigorous audits, pollution is still expanding and spreading along with the supply chain.

Of course, none of this is good news for gadget hounds. But is it bad enough to make people swear off iPads? Or at least to pressure Apple to change its ways?