India 2012, an e-waste bin

What a dump, and it is growing by the hour. Almost 40 per cent of the municipal and plastic waste generated in India is not collected, and half of the organic waste goes untreated. And then there is the growing problem of electronic waste.

By 2012, India will generate the most e-waste in the world, second only to China. Most cities do not have adequate infrastructure to manage the growing household and plastic rubbish, even though there are technologies available for treatment and reuse.
"There are only 110 facilities in the country for treating hardly 50 per cent of the organic waste generated," says the environment ministry's report on Road Map on Management of Waste in India A committee of the ministry has sought a law for waste-management with punitive action against defaulters.
The report call for higher penalty for those failing to properly dispose of municipal garbage. "Unless the city administrations get serious about waste management, the problem could become a major health risk," an official, who didn't wish to be identified, said. But, it's the economic growth that poses the biggest challenge - managing e-waste, which can be a discarded refrigerator or end-of-life cellphone or a laptop.
By 2012, India will generate over 800,000 million tonne (mt) of e-waste every year. At present, Mumbai tops the e-waste chart followed by Delhi. Western countries are adding to this mound. The estimate is not known as the ministry believes much of the e-waste is brought in illegally. NGOs such as Toxic Link have raised health concern over US and Europe dumping e-waste in India.

How Carbon-14 Dating Works

You probably have seen or read news stories about fascinating ancient artifacts. At an ar chaeological dig, a piece of wooden tool is unearthed and the archaeologist finds it to be 5,000 years old. A child mummy is found high in the Andes and the archaeologist says the child lived more than 2,000 years ago. How do scientists know how old an object or human remains are? What methods do they use and how do these methods work? In this article, we will examine the methods by which scientists use radioactivity to determine the age of objects, most notably carbon-14 dating.

Carbon-14 dating is a way of determining the age of certain archeological artifacts of a biological origin up to about 50,000 years old. It is used in dating things such as bone, cloth, wood and plant fibers that were created in the relatively recent past by human activities.

Carbon Dating - What Is It And How Does It Work?

This is how carbon dating works: Carbon is a naturally abundant element found in the atmosphere, in the earth, in the oceans, and in every living creature. C-12 is by far the most common isotope, while only about one in a trillion carbon atoms is C-14. C-14 is produced in the upper atmosphere when nitrogen-14 (N-14) is altered through the effects of cosmic radiation bombardment (a proton is displaced by a neutron effectively changing the nitrogen atom into a carbon isotope). The new isotope is called "radiocarbon" because it is radioactive, though it is not dangerous. It is naturally unstable and so it will spontaneously decay back into N-14 after a period of time. It takes about 5,730 years for half of a sample of radiocarbon to decay back into nitrogen. It takes another 5,730 for half of the remainder to decay, and then another 5,730 for half of what's left then to decay and so on. The period of time that it takes for half of a sample to decay is called a "half-life."

Carbon Dating - The Premise
Carbon dating is a dating technique predicated upon three things:

• The rate at which the unstable radioactive C-14 isotope decays into the stable non-radioactive N-14 isotope,
• The ratio of C-12 to C-14 found in a given specimen,
• And the ratio C-12 to C-14 found in the atmosphere at the time of the specimen's death.