white chemistry

It's white this morning - it's been snowing on and off for the past couple of days, but it wasn't sticking. This morning though, there's a small layer - the rugby fields outside my window look especially cold and unwelcoming. It's a small enough amount of snow that it doesn't look fluffy, just about to be gray, cold, and muddy.

I'm taking an intensive course which spans just two weeks and starts next Monday. An MIT guy, that's why he can get away with the unusual schedule. And because it's a legal course, the reading is crazy - BUT, bless them, it's all photocopied into one neat little package. No more hunting books around across 5 libraries (which is what I'd started doing after I got the reading list and before I was told about the reading pack). It's utterly depressing (the topic of the class is environmental legal frameworks and economic incentives).

Quoting a study. On Air Quality:

There are roughly 48,000 industrial chemicals in the air in the United States, only a quarter of which are documented with toxicity data.

It gets worse. On Chemicals,

Of the 70,000 chemicals in commercial use in 1995, only 2% had been fully tested for human health effects, and 70% had not been tested for any health effects of any kind. At least 1000 new chemicals are introduced into commercial use each year, largely untested. The chemical industry continues to grow at a rate of 3.5% each year, thus doubling every 20 years.

And later in the chapter,

In the early 1980s, the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council completed a four-year study and found 78% of the chemicals in highest-volume commercial use had not had even "minimal" toxicity testing. Chemical safety can't be based on faith. It requires fact.

Finally on the petrochemical industry,

produces about 265 million metric tons of hazardous waste annually. About a third of this waste is emitted, uncontrolled, into the environment. Only about one per cent of the industry's toxic waste is actually destroyed. Unlike the steel, auto, and electric-power industries, the petrochemical industry -- on its present scale ast least - is not essential. Nearly all its products are substitutes for perfectly serviceable preexisting ones: plastics for paper, wood, and metals; detergents for soap; nitrogen fertilizer for soil, organic matter, and nitrogen-fixing crops (the natural sources of nitrogen); pesticides for the insects' natural predators...

Well, good morning to you all anyway :S