U.S. A Third-World Country In 20 Years ?

Just one way I believe could make a huge difference is to make manufacturers responsible for their products from birth to death. In other words if you make tvs for instance you are responsible for that item from the time you buy the ingredients until it ends up ready for a landfill. You have to take it back and either recyle what you can or safely dispose of it. If that were the case, I believe there would be far fewer companies making useless, excessive, planet eating junk because it would be more costly to produce than it would be worth making. I also believe companies would be once again making products that last longer than a 30 day warranty, which would put mega stores like WalMart out of business hopefully.

Making products that require thinking about recyling the dead item would require a whole new creative mind. A whole new designer. And the way the product is made would likely clean up factories as a by-product.

I'm not exactly sure how this would keep jobs but my big-picture intuition says it would. My get to the details small-screen needs some work.

Oh and Jim, I thought I'd also mention if the Saudis ever decided to call the U.S. debt they'd be a third world country that same day. Also I think if things continue the way they are 20 years is also a stretch. Frankly I'd be surprised if things can go on as they are beyond 5 years.

Europe already has such rules. Companies are responsible for taking back their products, and it encourages them to use recyclable materials. Sounds great! Why don't we do this too?

The US is on the way down, every empire declines, and often falls, eventually. The question is will we allow ourselves to be taken down with them?

Perhaps you have noticed some containers are clearly marked "recycleable where services are offered" or something like that.

I have always believed that aluminum pop cans could be recycled at the beer stores, and put a small price on it so it makes it worthwhile to take the trouble. It costs less to recycle aluminum than it is to manufacture it from scratch.

The system is already in place, but the cans still end up on the side of the road. Also, they take hundreds or thousands of years to break down in the landfills.

That is only the start.

This is a possible way to employ many people but the wages would be low. Tough call.

All that extra packaging is a whole 'nother matter. That is disgusting.




---
"Arrogance in Politics is unacceptable"
Jim Callaghan
Minden, Ontario
705-286-1860
www.misterc.ca

Yes, if we,because of our sellout politicians, get dragged down with them, we`ll be a third world country too. We`re on our way. But we can stop this! I get a good feeling we will!

---
Dave Ruston

I think 1 billion is a stretch. Birth rates will start to slow even more in the United States, too, and we MAY not have a plentiful source of clean energy by then. If we don't, people won't have kids, or create them in a lab. (who knows in 100 years.)

I think the U.S. population may actually shrink. Whether that's good or not is up to you to decide. They aren't over-populated, they just have too much sprawl, and don't use resources as well as they should....not that we're perfect, either.

They'd also have much more farmland available for food production is they simply stopped farming tobacco--the biggest waste of resources.

I visited someone in Alabama a few years ago and was shocked by how impoverished the state was at that time. The ubiquitous walmart complex on the outskirts of small boarded up towns, the local papers all full of bankruptcy sales and loans guaranteed for bankrupt people. The state government was so broke that it couldn't pay people's tax refunds until it received some money back from the few who worked enough to pay taxes.

I've travelled in Central America and I found the poverty in the southern US somehow more shocking I guess because I didn't expect to see it in the US.

On another note but the same because it also is a big cause of poverty down there... the last thing that we want is to privatize our medicine and have to deal with their style of health care.