[Earth Day is Thursday. But maybe don't wear green to celebrate.]
[The last paragraph on Napoleon is a must see. I'd heard the arsenic theory. But I don't think I ever knew the role green played in it.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/arts/05iht-design5.html
The New York Times
April 5, 2010
Design
The Toxic Side of Being, Literally, Green
By ALICE RAWSTHORN
<snip>
Kermit was correct, being green really is tough, so tough that the
color itself fails dismally. The cruel truth is that most forms of
the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design,
aren't ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the
environment.
"Ironic, isn't it?" said Michael Braungart, the German chemist who
co-wrote "Cradle to Cradle," the best-selling sustainable design
book, and co-founded the U.S. design consultancy McDonough Braungart
Design Chemistry. "The color green can never be green, because of
the way it is made. It's impossible to dye plastic green or to print
green ink on paper without contaminating them."
This means that green-colored plastic and paper cannot be recycled
or composted safely, because they could contaminate everything else.
The crux of the problem is that green is such a difficult color to
manufacture that toxic substances are often used to stabilize it.
Take Pigment Green 7, the commonest shade of green used in plastics
and paper. It is an organic pigment but contains chlorine, some
forms of which can cause cancer and birth defects. Another popular
shade, Pigment Green 36, includes potentially hazardous bromide
atoms as well as chlorine; while inorganic Pigment Green 50 is a
noxious cocktail of cobalt, titanium, nickel and zinc oxide.
If you look at the history of green, it has always been troublesome.
Revered in Islamic culture for evoking the greenery of paradise, it
has played an accident-prone role in Western art history. From the
Italian Renaissance to 18th-century Romanticism, artists struggled
over the centuries to mix precise shades of green paint, and to
reproduce them accurately.
Even if they succeeded, the results often faded or discolored, as
did green dyes. When the 19th-century British designer William
Morris created wallpapers inspired by medieval tapestries, he copied
the blue hues in the originals. But most of those "blues" were
really greens, which had changed color over the years.
Green even has a toxic history. Some early green paints were so
corrosive that they burnt into canvas, paper and wood. Many popular
18th- and 19th-century green wallpapers and paints were made with
arsenic, sometimes with fatal consequences. One of those paints,
Scheele's Green, invented in Sweden in the 1770s, is thought by some
historians to have killed Napoleon Bonaparte in 1821, when lethal
arsenic fumes were released from the rotting green and gold
wallpaper in his damp cell on the island of Saint Helena.
<end excerpt>
Michael