Think we have environmental problems?

From the Australian News.com website:

Rubbish threatens to jam China's Three Gorges dam
Layers of rubbish floating in the Yangtze river are threatening to jam China's massive Three Gorges hydroelectric dam, state media reported Monday. The garbage is so thick in parts of the river that people can walk on the surface, reports said.

Nearly three tonnes of refuse are collected from the dam every day, but operators are struggling with inadequate manpower and equipment as trash accumulates more quickly due to rain-triggered floods, the China Daily reported.

"The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the mitre gate (a type of lock gate) of the Three Gorges Dam," Chen Lei, an official with the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the newspaper.

More than 150 million people live upstream from the dam. In several nearby cities, household garbage is dumped directly into the river - China's longest - because municipalities are unequipped for trash disposal.

Emphasis mine. One bit more:

A 60cm thick layer of garbage covering an area of more than 50,000 square metres began to form in front of the dam when the rainy season started in early July, according to the Hubei Daily.

It always amazes me that environmentalists in the USA develop a blind eyeball to conditions like this. There are various rare earths and minerals that could be mined here but noooooo -- mining is dirty and we must protect the environment. So the minerals are imported from nations that have no environmental protection at all. What chaps my ass is that for the simple cost of a few dollars/ton more; the US could build into the mining contract the stipulation that when the last of the mineral was extracted, the land be remediated and returned back to nature. Fifty years later, you would need a professional Geologist to know that anything had happened there. Blind -- utterly blind and willfully ignorant.