Lead (Mercury, PCB’s, Cadmium, Copper, Ash, Acid, And Slag) Us To The Promised Land(fill)?

One of the greatest ideas of our lifetime is the concept of instantaneous access to all of the information accumulated over the span of the centuries. Human existence and scientific speculation of the Earth before human existence is now available to almost everyone in the world via the Internet. Cellular telephones ensure constant contact with anyone who has a phone, and the television screen has broadcast images of both beauty and horror to the world. These three items provide information to make life easier, less stressful, and allocate us more time to do the things we want to do. With the technology available currently, a person at home with an ordinary PC (or Mac) can do the same number of calculations in seconds that Mission Control in Houston used in the first lunar landing. However, with these wonderful advances in technology comes a price. As technological advances enable us to make things smaller, faster, and capable of doing more things, we cast away the old methods and tools we used in favor of the latest toy with no regard to where the waste goes. It is remarkable that such intelligence and forward thought have bought us to the brink of poisoning a staggering portion of our population with the waste generated by obsolescence. Why is it, with all of the pure promise and hope that mankind offers the Earth, we manage to continually abuse, neglect, poison and destroy our own living environment with no regards to the consequences?

Old Cell Phones make Neat Toys For Children

Well, in a manner of speaking. Electronic waste poses a problem with recycling because there is just so much of it. Millions of cell phones are tossed away every day, along with old computers, iPods, monitors, and television sets. Since most of this waste is plastic and metal, there isn’t an easy way to dispose of this waste in a landfill environment without leaching harmful chemicals and toxins into the water table. Metals and plastic also pose problems for large scale incineration because of emissions. And lastly, without some sort of recovery, we would be losing tons of valuable metal to waste a year. With recycling centers few and far between in the United States, a great deal of this E-waste is shipped overseas to developing countries such as China, where the component parts of our throw-away cell phones, computers, and monitors are stripped , melted down, and sold to a local recycling center for pennies on the dollar with no regard to human health or environmental consequences.
With the average shelf life of less than 7 years, consumers are tossing away millions of cell phones, televisions, and computers daily. It is estimated that that 6 million tons of E-waste hit the landfill a year in the United States alone. E-waste is recyclable, but some precautions are necessary in order to minimize the negative impact on air quality. The problem here is there isn’t a large scale recycle program to cope with the sheer numbers of electronics getting thrown away each year, so ‘recyclers’ ship these products overseas to Africa and China where they are broken down into their component parts using primitive methods such as coal fire burners and acid baths to melt and leach heavy metals out of the electronics. One such recycle landfill in China has a soil pH of 1, or the same pH as sulfuric acid. This soil content is no longer usable for growing crops, so the local farm community is working in the recycle field instead, earning up to 8 dollars a day, with children as young as 4 years old picking through the electronic trash to make a few pennies. As a nation, there are certain things we do very well, but using our garbage to exploit children and child labor working in hazardous conditions is not supposed to be one of them.

So, What Can I Do To Help?

Electronic waste is not going away. We will always be pushing the envelope to make things faster, smaller, and more powerful to fuel the marketplace. In the last few years, we have learned what we are not supposed to do with E-waste, but it will require some forethought to change the methods we currently use. We need to make our electronics more upgradable, instead of replacing the entire unit whenever we get something new and shiny to add to our growing pile of entertainment products. Until we figure this part out, we can :

* Quit buying a new cell phone every 6 months. Its a PHONE. The people you call can’t see it anyhow.
* If you are going to buy a computer or a laptop, make sure it is upgradable. We can’t afford to keep throwing away a compute just because its ‘slow.’
* Stay away from internet porn. In many cases, these sites have viruses that can contaminate your computer, making it run slower or destroying the hard drive completely.
* If you do get a new cell phone, give your old one to a responsible organzation that can use it, such as the Salvation Army.
* When disposing of electronics, ask your local landfill operator to show you the proper method and place to dispose of the E-waste. They will be more than happy to help you along.
* Keep that old television as long as you can. New plasma screen televisions use 4x the electricity of the old cathode ray model. If you HAVE to have the BEST television, maybe you should get out more.
*When possible, buy rechargeable batteries. They last thousands of hours longer, and this keeps them out of the landfills longer.
* If you are addicted to music, an mp3 player isn’t a bad choice. Anything is better than CD waste, and everything is better than a Joan Rivers comedy CD. She hasn’t been funny since 1978. If then.
* If you are going to buy a computer for the first time, consider a laptop. Laptop computers are easier to recycle than towers, and the monitor is a lot easier on the environment to recycle. Plus, when it freezes up, it is easier to fling across the room.

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