Down to Earth Blog

Today I have my first guest blogger, Elizabeth Grossman, author of the new book 'High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics and Human Health,' published in May by Island Press. She has also written "Watershed: The Undamming of America," and "Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail," and was co-editor of "Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion." Her work has appeared in variety of publications including Salon, The Washington Post, The Nation, Grist, and Orion. She writes from Portland, Oregon.

High-tech trash is a serious issue. I've read an excerpt from her new book, in which she points out that Americans own over two billion pieces of high-tech electronics, from cell phones to computers to televisions. What happens when we throw them away?

Here is Elizabeth's post:

"A recent Friday morning found me in San Francisco International Airport, talking to a reporter on my cell phone, checking email and searching the Web on my laptop. Nearby a small crowd had gathered to watch the live broadcast of a World Cup match on a restaurant’s large flat screen TV. When the plane sat on the tarmac for an hour waiting to take off, my neighbors clicked away on their BlackBerries and listened to their iPods. This universe of instant communication, entertainment, and information has become so ubiquitous that we rarely stop to think about what actually enables it, let alone what goes into producing these digital devices or what happens to them when the next wave of technology renders the current generation obsolete.

But this digital wizardry relies on a complex array of materials: metals, elements, plastics, and chemical compounds. Producing these powerful electronics requires hundreds of different manufacturing steps – many involving hazardous chemicals – and large amounts of energy and water. Each sleek piece of equipment has a story that begins in mines, refineries, factories, rivers and aquifers, and ends on pallets, in dumpsters and landfills all around the world. Hightech electronics may have brought us virtual reality, but their production and disposal have environmental impacts that are extremely real.

My introduction to the subject of High Tech Trash came in 2000, when I discovered that high tech manufacturing -- semiconductor, silicon wafer and specialty-metals production -- was sending millions of pounds of toxic chemicals annually into the Willamette River, which flows a few minutes walk from my front door in Portland, Oregon. Surprised that this Information Age industry was so polluting, I decided to investigate further. Much of what I learned isn’t pretty.

Worldwide, some 20 to 50 million tons of electronics are discarded each year and barely 10 percent of that is recycled. In the U.S., where the federal government disposes of over 10,000 computers a week, about 2 million tons of e-waste ends up in landfills each year. About half of what we recycle is exported to developing nations – China, India, countries in Southeast Asia, Africa and elsewhere – for inexpensive, labor intensive, environmentally unsound and unhealthy recycling. Some of these exports are simply dumped.

High tech electronics now entering the waste stream contain numerous heavy metals – including lead, cadmium, barium, and mercury – as well as many synthetic chemicals hazardous to the environment and human health. While some flame-retardants used in electronics are escaping intact equipment, these other toxics pose a threat primarily when equipment is damaged or improperly discarded or recycled.

I learned that extracting and processing the raw materials that go into high tech electronics impacts nearly every continent. And that high tech manufacturing has left a damaging legacy of groundwater contamination in Silicon Valley and other communities where the industry worked in the 1970s and ‘80s. Some chemicals used to make high tech electronics have caused workers serious health problems. Others are turning up people and food all around the world. And new chemicals – whose long-term impacts we don’t know – are constantly being introduced in high tech manufacturing.

As awareness of these problems has grown over the past handful of years, industry, policy makers and environmental advocates have been working on solutions. Industry is working to design products with fewer adverse environmental impacts. States, local communities, and businesses are beginning to demand environmentally and socially responsible solutionsfor their e-waste. But the U.S. lags far behind the EU and Japan in national electronics recycling programs, in curbing e-waste exports, and hazardous materials restrictions. And as of 2005, most Americans still did not know of the term e-waste or how to recycle a computer. I wrote this book with the hope of illuminating why the changes now underway – and those yet to be made – are so important, and because I believe the more we know about the problems caused by high tech trash and manufacturing, and the wider this knowledge is spread, the more quickly these problems may be solved."
-- Elizabeth Grossman

You can also check out her article, 'How to Recycle Your Computer,'on Salon.com.

More info about electronics recycling is available at earth911.org.

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