A lot of awful things happen because people are just negligent, desperate, and ignorant.

Perhaps a lot of the radioactive scrap is being created knowingly, I don't know. When there are well-documented incidents like this, I can imagine this happening in small ways all the time and stuff just entering the supply chain by accident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Of course when organized crime gets involved your diagnosis of psychopathy is not too far off:

https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-wast...

Do you think it's an accident China does not screen their export goods for safety? Nobody thought about it somehow for decades?

Organized crime runs all the way through the system in many places, not just China.

Does any country screen their exports for safety? Screening imports I've heard before, but never exports.

How can a random truck stop in Kentucky detect that radiation, but apparently goods passed through Chinese ports (and in fact the supply chain) without setting off anything anywhere?

Think about that for a minute.

Because your random truckspot has way lower throughput than any major port. You absolutely can do a full freeze-and-search on a German Autobahn (and it regularly gets done to check for driving clock records, overloading and insecure fastening of load), but in a port? No way. Only thing that's remotely practical is to check 1 of N containers with a drug dog or an x-ray and that's it.

it takes too much effort to get rid of it. so it gets passed around until someone dumps it, so everyone that handled it can claim that they're not responsible for it.

it happens in kentucky: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/tech/science/environme...

it's just human nature. the act is not much different from throwing a battery into the trash when you should really be recycling it.

lead paint is used in industry, probably in america too. a toy company can simply order it and use it to paint their toys. or they make more than toys or they have that paint from a long time ago so they're going to use it.

it's all about convenience and just doing the job that someone has hired you to do. i think most people can relate to that a little. I'll continue using straws until I can't get them or until they're illegal. And maybe making them illegal is the best option we have if we don't want them in our oceans.

No, if cadmium and lead are turning up in pencil cases, it's probably because they were used in the paints or inks used for decoration.

Cadmium has been used for reds, yellows, and orange pigments since the 1840s. White lead pigments go back to the 4th century BC. Red lead pigments were used in ancient Rome. Yellow lead pigments (lead(II) chromate) were developed in the 1810s.

For the most part these have been phased out due to toxicity, but perhaps in China they are available cheap and in the case of cadmium pigments are really good, strongly colored, durable pigments, if you ignore the toxicity.