Bangladesh's Toxic Tanneries

If you buy leather produced in Bangladesh, odds are it came from the these conditions. There comes a time when everyone has to make the decision as what they will accept and what they cannot accept. Then, they must decide whether they will act or ignore the situation. After you have finished viewing the videos and reading the blog, it is my sincere wish that each reader will refuse to buy Bangladeshi leather particularly Hazaribagh leather. Then, if the spirit is moved, letter, emails or phone calls to local leather shops letting them know that if they sell Bangladeshi leather, you will take your business elsewhere.

To contact the Bangladeshi government:
Prime Minister's Office
Old Sangsad Bhaban
Address: Tejgaon, Dhaka-1215
Bangladesh
E-mail: info@pmo.gov.bd (link is on right-hand side of page)

A new report from Human Rights Watch exposes the horrific environmental, health, and social conditions under which 90% of Bangladesh's leather is produced, in the Hazaribagh area of the nation's capital Dhaka.

You can watch the short video above to get the gist of the situation — which involves child labor, the government admitting it doesn't enforce the laws that are on the books, and pretty horribly working conditions all around — but here are some of the deeper details of the report:

Leather produced in Hazaribagh goes to 70 countries, but most of it ends up in China, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain and the US. For the past ten years Bangladesh's leather industry has grown by $41 million per year, with $663 million worth of leather produced in 2011-2012.

As far as the environmental impact goes, the report summary says:

The wastewater that pours off tannery floors and into Hazaribagh’s open gutters and eventually Dhaka’s main river contains, among other substances, animal flesh, sulfuric acid, chromium, and lead. The government estimates that about 21,000 cubic meters of untreated effluent is released each day in Hazaribagh. Government officials and tannery industry representatives told Human Rights Watch that no Hazaribagh tannery has an effluent treatment plant to treat its waste, which can have many thousands of times the legally permitted concentrations of pollutants.

And the child labor/poor working conditions aspect:

Human Rights Watch interviewed children, some as young as 11, working in tanneries. They were engaged in hazardous work, such as soaking hides in chemicals, cutting tanned hides with razorblades, and operating dangerous tanning machinery. Women and girls said that they are paid comparatively less than men and that, in addition to their own work, they must also perform tasks normally performed by men.

Read the full report: Toxic Tanneries: The Health Repercussions of Bangladesh's Hazaribagh Leather

And, of course, all of this is after the fact that the animals raised for leather probably had horrendous living conditions as well...

A brilliant video produced by a tourist to the country; and, what he sees in the tannery district.

Radioactive Tuna Found in US Waters

Northern blue fin tuna. Photo via: TreeHugger.com

It's been more than a year since an earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered tsunamis and the nation was brought to the brink of nuclear disaster, but the environmental impact of those events has hardly subsided. According to scientists, scores of bluefin tuna have begun arriving to the west coast of the United States bearing qualities startlingly similar to Godzilla, another famed Japanese export -- namely, they're radioactive.

While the highly-charged migratory fish don't seem poised to trample any unsuspecting cities just yet, experts are still concerned to find the radiation leaked from Japan's nuclear power plant at Fukushima has found its way across the Pacific.

"We were frankly kind of startled," says Nicholas Fisher, a researcher studying the radioactive tuna's arrival to California.

In a study slated to appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists report that more than a dozen bluefin tuna fish caught off the coast of San Diego last year showed abnormally high levels of radioactive caesium, conclusively linked to the accidental discharges washed into the waters around Fukushima.

Researchers say that, although the level of radiation found in these samples is more than ten times what was found before the disaster, the radioactive tuna is still within the range considered safe for human consumption, reports the BBC.

However, the case does illustrate how migratory species can carry pollution over vast distances, they say.

"It's a lesson to us in how interconnected eco-regions can be, even when they may be separated by thousands of miles," Nicholas Fisher, a professor of marine sciences at Stony Brook University, New York, told BBC News.

The findings should serve as a humbling reminder about the broad-reaching impacts that nuclear disaster could have on the health of the world's species, ecosystems, and even ourselves, particularly considering how narrowly the worst-case-scenario at Japan's Fukushima plant was avoided.

Just to be safe, in light of these as yet innocuous radioactive tuna fish reaching the furthest corners of the Pacific, it might be best if we avoid calling them "chicken" -- of the sea, or otherwise.

Pacific "Garbage Patch" Changing Mating Habits of Insects

Seaplex researchers Matt Durham and Miriam Goldstein encounter netting and plastic in the Pacific. Photo courtesy: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Marine insects in the Pacific Ocean are changing their reproduction habitats in response to environmental changes from the accumulating amount of rubbish in the north Pacific subtropical gyre, also known as the great Pacific garbage patch, according to researchers.

The patch has increased in size 100 times since the 1970s, including its swath of microplastic particles of less than 5mm diameter. The marine insect Halobates sericeus, a species of water skater, is now using the microplastic debris as a surface to lay its eggs, said a study by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

"This paper shows a dramatic increase in plastic over a relatively short time period and the effect it's having on a common North Pacific Gyre invertebrate," said graduate student and lead author Miriam Goldstein, in a statement released by Scripps. "We're seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic."

Goldstein was part of a graduate student team, the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (Seaplex), which travelled to the patch to study its environmental impact in 2009. The study compared the group's findings to data from the early 1970s.

The Seaplex team found that water skaters typically lay their eggs on floating objects like seashells, bird feathers and pumice, but the change to plastic could have "ecosystem-wide consequences". The insects are an important link on the marine food chain, plus predators like crabs rely on their eggs as a source of food.

Increased quantities of microplastic could also mean population growth of the water skaters, and more pressure on their prey zooplankton and fish eggs, according to the study.

Debris from the patch has had an impact on other marine life, including ingestion by fish and invertebrates at a rate of roughly 12,000 to 24,000 tonnes per year, according to Scripps. It also transports pollutants and has introduced alien species into new areas.