Name some Metals and how they are harmful to the environment?

Question

Say how the metal is harmful to plants, animals and the environment.

Please say HOW they are harmful.

Answer 1

One very good example is lead. When cars were first invented they suffered from something called 'knocking' - essentially the engine would shake itself apart. Then a man called Thomas Midgley found that adding lead to the petrol made the engine run perfectly smoothly. It very quickly became suspect, when workers at the lead-adding plant became very ill, being sick, suffering hallucinations and eventually dying. Suspicion fell on the lead in the petrol - it was known that lead wasn't particularly good for you. Midgley tried to prove people wrong by holding a jar of petrol under his nose for some minutes, and rubbing it on his hands - this satisfied the journalists, who didn't know that Midgley became very ill afterwards.

However, leaded petrol was extremely big buisiness, and even after scientific studies were carried out saying that lead COULDN'T be the cause because the subjects had no lead in their urine or blood. Little did they know that lead accumulates in the bones, which is why it's so dangerous - and this wouldn't be picked up on blood and urine tests. Lead continued to be added to petrol - which meant that it was added to the atmosphere in increasingly vast amounts, so people all around the world were breathing it in, and building up the levels of lead in their bodies as time passed.

Eventually it was discovered just HOW poisonous lead was - but it still took a long time for lead to be removed from petrol, because it was so immensely profitable. However, the environmental lobby eventually won and forced laws to be passed that removed lead from petrol. However, because lead is very unreactive all the lead in the atmosphere will be there for hundreds of thousands of years.

One particularly ironic thing was Midgley also invented CFCs - the chemical responsible destroying the ozone layer that protects us from harmful UV rays from the sun. One man who single-handedly created two of the biggest environmental catastrophes.

Answer 2

"Toxic Metal Syndrome" exposes the root causes of the wastes that cause debilitating conditions and pollute the environment and explodes the myth that nothing can be done to avoid or treat them...I believe it's called: MERCURY...

Answer 3

almost all metals are harmful to life in some way or other, most particularly mercury, because it is so heavy and so toxic and easily absorbed

Answer 4

some metals are not releasable thru the kidneys and are toxic
like lead and mercury.
remember it is the dosage as 2 gallons of ingested water will kill you

Answer 5

Heavy metal. It hurts my ears

Answer 6

Gold. People are always discarding large amounts of gold and hurting ferns and squirrels.

Answer 7

all alkaline metals because water dont mix well with them

Answer 8

radioactive metals like polonium and radium.

Answer 9

Mercury, Lithium, titanium etc....

Answer 10

steel, iron, aluminium because they're not disposed off properly