Toxic waste
Mostly generated by industry, consumer products like televisions, computers, and phones contain toxic chemicals that can pollute the air and contaminate soil and water.
Toxic materials are poisonous byproducts as a result of industries such as manufacturing, farming, construction, automotive, laboratories, and hospitals which may contain heavy metals, radiation, dangerous pathogens, or other toxins.
Products such as cellular telephones, computers, televisions, and solar panels contain toxic chemicals that can harm the environment if not disposed of properly to prevent air pollution and the contamination of soils and water.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has identified 11 key substances that pose a risk to human health: The most overlooked toxic and hazardous wastes are the household products in everyday homes that are improperly disposed of such as old batteries, pesticides, paint, and car oil.
[3] Toxic wastes often contain carcinogens, and exposure to these by some route, such as leakage or evaporation from the storage, causes cancer to appear at increased frequency in exposed individuals.
For example, a cluster of the rare blood cancer polycythemia vera was found around a toxic waste dump site in northeast Pennsylvania in 2008.
[5] People encounter these toxins buried in the ground, in stream runoff, in groundwater that supplies drinking water, or in floodwaters, as happened after Hurricane Katrina.
[6] In the United States today millions of Americans live near a toxic waste site that is in a radius of three miles of where they currently reside.
With diseases on the rise, the disability-adjusted life year (DALY) starts to decline, so the time the average person lives decreases, especially in low to middle-income countries.
These low to middle-income countries (LMIC) have minimal resources to deal with toxic waste, such as "inadequate regulation, the informality of many industries, poor surveillance, and improper disposal of contaminants."
Children are more susceptible than adults to absorbing more lead if exposed early on, causing them to have "behavioral problems in adolescence, IQ decrements, cognitive impairment, and decreased visuospatial skills."
In recent years in the region of Campania, Italy there has been a rise in illegal dumping and burning of toxic and solid waste.
In response to this, there has been a rise of dangerous chemical molecules like dioxins that are carcinogenic, which implies that they have the potential to cause cancer, that is appearing in humans and animals.
To assess the causal relations between cancer mortality and congenital malformations in humans coming from illegal dumping a map was drawn using the geographical locations of the sites.
Before the passage of modern environmental laws (in the US, this was in the 1970s), it was legal to dump such wastes into streams, rivers, and oceans, or bury them underground in landfills.
Burial sites for toxic waste and other contaminated brownfield land may eventually be used as greenspace or redeveloped for commercial or industrial use.
[16] There has been a long ongoing battle between communities and environmentalists versus governments and corporations about how strictly and how fairly the regulations and laws are written and enforced.
In North Carolina, PCB-contaminated oil was deliberately dripped along rural Piedmont highways, creating the largest PCB spills in American history and a public health crisis that would have repercussions for generations to come.
This assumption informed the siting of toxic waste landfills and waivers to regulations that were included in EPA's Federal Register.
Years of research and empirical knowledge of the failures of the Warren County PCB landfill led citizens of Warren County to conclude that the EPA's dry-tomb landfill design and regulations governing the disposal of toxic and hazardous waste were not based on sound science and adequate technology.
The Human Rights Council has further extended the scope of its mandates as of September 2012 due to the result of the dangerous implications occurring to persons advocating environmentally sound practices regarding the generation, management, handling, distribution, and final disposal of hazardous and toxic materials to include the issue of the protection of the environmental human rights defenders.
"Toxic waste" is often utilized in science fiction as a plot device that causes organisms or characters to undergo mutation.
