Now that those costs are clear, we need to reinvent just about everything.

contain lead, but also other toxic ingredients like mercury

GoodGuide

LCAs can provide the raw data that let us be ecologically intelligent about what we buy,

glassmaking's negative impacts; the chemicals released into the air from the glass factory run from relatively high levels of carbon dioxide to trace amounts of toxic metals like cadmium.

witnessed the emergence of industrial ecology, a discipline that uses Life-Cycle Assessment (or LCA) to deconstruct any manufactured item into its subsidiary industrial processes and their myriad ecological impacts with great precision.

But our perceptual system misses the signals when the threat comes in the form of gradual rises in planetary temperature, or minuscule chemicals that build up in our body over time.

Our brains are exquisitely attuned to pinpoint and instantly react

se, where the most swimmers are drawn to the beauty of coral reefs.

sunscreen primes the growth of a deadly virus in coral reef.

impacts left along the way from the extraction or concoction of its ingredients, during its manufacture and transport, through its use in our homes and workplaces, to the day we dispose of it.

hidden price tag:

costs less than alternates

lead in paint makes colors (particularly yellow and red)

wooden

by humans, can transmit new diseases, devastate crops and eat away at crucial infrastructure

Fire ant colonies have wide-ranging impacts; they can feed on a variety of seedlings, from citrus to soybeans, reduce the size of grazing lands for livestock and bite and sting farm animals and humans.

crops and tree farms, their high cost in this analysis boils down to their impact on infrastructure.

eroy’s analysis comes from their impact on native biodiversity and resulting losses in spending on birdwatching and hunting birds like ducks, pheasants and grouse.

biodiversity losses, but the rodents also can damage crops, destroy property and transmit disease (like the bubonic plague).

human boats

The analysis was heavily weighted towards North America, Europe and parts of Asia and Oceania. Agricultural pests, like insects, tended to be overrepresented in published literature compared with invasive plants.

$892 billion

deforestation and agricultural expansion

annual costs roughly doubled every six years, reaching a yearly bill of $162.7 billion in 2017.

that cost grows.

$1.28 trillion i

Predators such as eagles and owls that feast on those water birds also get poisoned.

Water birds gorge on the Hydrilla and its ride-along bacteria and thus get a deadly dose of toxin.

That’s when the cyanobacteria have the ingredients to make their deadly toxin.

Bromin

These colonies did yield substances that killed test animals.

. It took two years after collecting the stuff from a reservoir before the team raised enough cyanobacteria for their first trial feeding a watery solution of it to test animals.

That revealed splats of cyanobacteria gripping the undersides of leaves and protecting their colonies with goo. Some other cyanobacteria, which slosh around as soup in water, release great flushes of toxins that kill fish and threaten human swimmers, but leaf-clingers weren’t typically menaces.

Hydrilla verticillata.

six states had confirmed bird die-offs with the same disease, now called VM, short for vacuolar myelinopathy.

unnatural microscopic holes

motor coordination, struggled to fly or even walk, and had seizures.

began at an Arkansas lake during the winter of 1994–95 with the nation’s largest unexplained die-off of bald eagles

element bromine

AETX,

oxin

cyanobacteria