As is the planets atmosphere, which for the longest time served as a justification to pump it full with emissions, that now leave us with a run-away problem at a scale that's still difficult for most people to wrap their heads around.
Fukushima is leaking into the Pacific to this day even with Tepco collecting vast amounts of it to store in tanks. The US is dumping the majority of its PFAS into the Atlantic completely untreated, large parts of the world use the oceans as their dumpster, for agricultural, industrial, plastic and all kinds of other waste, to such a degree that we are running out of great coral reefs but instead have great garbage patches.
Yet for the longest time we only worried about oil spills, which are also an still on-going issue in addition to all the aforementioned ones, old ones like the vast amounts of munitions dumped into it, which also includes chemical weapons [0] and possibly upcoming ones like deep-sea mining.
It's mind-boggling to me how we as a collective species can be so unbelievably short-sighted to only recognize these problems once they've already run so far away from us that any attempts at solving them are borderline impossible.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo...
Probably not, ever since RoHS in 2002 lead has all but disappeared from electronics. Even though it’s an EU law, most suppliers have just decided to only provide RoHS-compliant parts, and PCB manufacturers only have options for RoHS-compliant solder.
The amount of lead in an electronic is probably measured in grams, and only if the device was manufactured prior to 2005 or so.
