> Wow, so China is actually becoming concerned about the 
> environment?

Not that I noticed in two trips there recently.
You probably can breathe in more lead in a 2 day visit to 
Beijing than is used on the world's supply of smd resistors 
in a year :-). OK, that's obviously an exaggeration. Make 
that 5 days.

In fact I have no idea how much lead is in the air in 
Beijing. But on a 500 km odd train ride up to Beijing from a 
city to the south on the coast the air pollution was 
constant. And the sources of it were everywhere evident on 
the trip. In Hong Kong, at about the south eastern 
extremity, the smog rolls in like thunder out of China 
'cross the bay. And I'm reliably told that in the far north 
west, near the Russian border, that people persist in 
wearing white clothes despite the fact that the air makes 
them dirty.

In the tourist books of the Great Wall the scenes are 
pristine and sharp and you can see clearly to the horizon. I 
have no idea of how this was achieved. In my visit the misty 
landscape looked rather nice, but it's a "mist" that 
persists. It will vary with time of day and I imagine that 
under some conditions the air gets swept clean and the 
photographers swarm to catch the moment. But wherever and 
whenever I went the vista was one of unremitting smog.

It's very sad, and hopefully one of these decades they may 
manage to get the country looking as beautiful as it once 
did. But, until then, I suspect that lead oxide on smd 
resistors is among the least of their problems.



            Russell

-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist