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Filmmaker Jerry Rothwell on Imagining a Better World—and How to Build It
We take the color white for granted—the brilliant white of Styrofoam cups, sunscreen, skimmed milk, and the lines on tennis courts. To produce it, manufacturers use titanium dioxide as a pigment, found in its most common natural form in a mineral called rutile. Around a third of the world’s rutile is in Sierra Leone, which sits on 259 million metric tons of the stuff (currently valued at around $1000 per ton).