Television housings, cathode ray tubes, computers, monitors, and other imported electronic waste items not salable at the Alaba Market in Lagos, Nigeria, are dumped in this nearby swamp. Credit: Basel Action Network

A policy analysis published Thursday in the journal Science calls our attention to something it's much easier to turn away from: what happens to outdated computer monitors, cell phones that aren't smart enough, cables that once powered discarded laptops, even old calculators. Much of this waste, which is largely a product of the developed world, ends up in the developing world, and the hazardous materials it contains accumulate in the food chain and in poor children's blood. In Africa, China, and India, markets for secondhand electronics are having a terrible impact. Children in Guiyu, China have high levels of lead in their blood and swamps in Nigeria overflow with discarded electronics.

So what can we do about it? The United States, one of the largest producers of electronic waste, is one of 23 member countries that has not ratified the United Nations' Basel Convention, which would regulate the movement of hazardous electronic materials across international borders. A bill in the Senate (S. 1397) would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to award grant money for recycling research and ask the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create a database of green electronic materials. According to the authors of the Science article, the European Union and the state of California both have complex and inconsistent waste policies, but we can still learn from them:

For example, Californians are willing to pay extra for "green" electronics products (e.g., containing fewer toxic substances, capable of being economically recycled) and to drive up to 8 miles to drop-off products for environmentally sensitive recycling. In addition, political mandates and economic incentives are key tools for engaging manufacturers,who will need to assume greater responsibility for designing electronic products that contain safer materials and are easily managed after consumers no longer want them.

However, the long-term solution, the authors suggest, is to change the way electronics are made in the first place:

Bart Gordon, Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, said that "we need our future engineers to understand that whatever they put together will eventually have to be taken apart."

This research rack was installed on the International Space Station this month. It contains two furnaces and is being used to study metal alloys in space. Credit: NASA

Earlier this month, researchers on the International Space Station installed a research rack dedicated to materials science. According to a press release from NASA, materials-science experiments on the space station should allow researchers to study processes that are important in the formation of alloys, ceramics, and other materials but tend to be masked by Earth's gravity. These include the transfer of heat and mass.

Here's a description of the instrument from NASA:

The Materials Science Research Rack is an automated facility with two different furnace inserts in which sample cartridges will be processed to temperatures up to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Initially, 13 sample cartridge assemblies will be processed, each containing mixtures of metal alloys. The cartridges are placed--one at a time--inside the furnace insert for processing. Once a cartridge is in place, the experiment can be run by automatic command or conducted via telemetry commands from the ground. Processed samples will be returned to Earth for evaluation and comparison of their properties to samples similarly processed on the ground.

Carbon nanoparticles fed to fruit fly larvae don't appear to harm them but remain in their tissues into adulthood. The fly on the right is a control; the one in the middle was fed carbon black while a larva; and the fly on the left was fed multi-walled carbon nanotubes while a larva. Credit: Brown University

A series of experiments in fruit flies suggests that different forms of carbon, though nearly chemically identical, have very different toxicities in fruit flies. Two of the materials caused physical impairment and mortality: carbon black, which is found in automobile tires and in an "activated" form in electrodes and filtration systems; and single-walled nanotubes, which are being explored for many electronics applications and are already used in composite materials.

Researchers at Brown University in Providence, RI exposed fruit-fly larvae and adults to four forms of carbon in their food and on their bodies. These included single-walled and multi-walled nanotubes, buckyballs, and carbon black. These materials are all based on meshes of carbon atoms in various forms. Nanotubes are rolled up sheets of carbon mesh in single or multiple layers; buckyballs are hollow spheres of the same mesh; and carbon black is made up of particles of elemental carbon.

The larvae could eat all four with no apparent adverse effects, though they did retain the particles in their tissues into adulthood. The researchers speculate that this could mean nanomaterials could accumulate and get passed up the food chain, just as DDT does.

In adult fruit flies, though, different forms of carbon had different effects. Adult fruit flies were dropped into test tubes containing the materials and observed as they made their way out or not. Buckyballs and multi-walled nanotubes didn't seem to harm the flies, but carbon black and single-walled nanotubes maimed and killed them. And the multi-walled nanotubes could be carried on the flies' bodies from one test tube to another just as other insects carry pollen, suggesting that they might act as vectors. The results were published online in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The Brown researchers will now try to determine the mechanism of the nanomaterials' effects, and will test other common nanomaterials including nanosilver. They suspect that the toxicity of some forms of carbon is related to the particulate nature of the materials. Dust in a coal mine harms the lungs not primarily because it contains toxins but because of the physical effects of the particles; something similar might be happening to the flies. So, are the fruit flies are the canaries in the nano coal mine? It's too early to say because what the results mean for humans is not clear. However, other researchers have previously reported that multi-walled nanotubes have the same carcinogenic effects as asbestos in the lungs of mice.