Greenpeace discovers hazardous chemicals in gaming consoles

This just in, violent video games don't kill people, game consoles do. Alright, that's not entirely true, the game consoles won't kill you, but the hardware used still contains hazardous chemicals, despite gaming companies cleaning up their act.

Greenpeace compared the PS3, Xbox and the Wii and found that all of them had hazardous chemicals, however, not in the same areas. Where one carried them, the next found an alternative way around using parts that would house the dangerous chemicals. Which makes the situation even more sad since all the companies would have to do is take a peak at the other company to find an alternative method that is much safer. The consoles showed signs of phthalates and bromine (with the PS3 having the highest lvl of bromine).

All of the chemicals used won't cause any deadly diseases, however, with prolonged use it can lead to issues with your learning and memory functions. Instead of slowing down your gaming, you can contact the gaming companies through Greenpeace to put a bit of pressure on them to clean up their consoles. There is no need to do anything hasty like laying off your GTA IV, just hop on Greenpeace and send off the already formulated email to the offending party. Also, one extra note, at this particular time Nintendo was the only link that actually worked to send off an email to the company. Both the Xbox and the PS3 just give an error upon clicking the link, hopefully Greenpeace will fix it soon.

[via joystiq]