High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health
Elizabeth Grossman
The Digital Age was expected to usher in an era of
clean production, an alternative to smokestack
industries and their pollutants. But as environmental
journalist Elizabeth Grossman reveals in this penetrating
analysis of high tech manufacture and disposal,
digital may be sleek, but it’s anything but
clean. Deep within every electronic device lie toxic
materials that make up the bits and bytes, a complex
thicket of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a
host of other often harmful ingredients.
High Tech Trash is a wake-up call to the importance of the e-waste issue
and the health hazards involved. Americans alone own more than two
billion pieces of high tech electronics and discard five to seven million
tons each year. As a result, electronic waste already makes up more than
two-thirds of the heavy metals and 40 percent of the lead found in our
landfills. But the problem goes far beyond American shores, most tragically
to the cities in China and India where shiploads of discarded electronics
arrive daily. There, they are “recycled”—picked apart by hand,
exposing thousands of workers and community residents to toxics.
As Grossman notes,“This is a story in which we all play a part, whether
we know it or not. If you sit at a desk in an office, talk to friends on
your cell phone, watch television, listen to music on headphones, are a
child in Guangdong, or a native of the Arctic, you are part of this story.”
The answers lie in changing how we design, manufacture, and dispose
of high tech electronics. Europe has led the way in regulating materials
used in electronic devices and in e-waste recycling. But in the
United States many have yet to recognize the persistent human health
and environmental effects of the toxics in high tech devices. If Silent
Spring brought national attention to the dangers of DDT and other
pesticides, High Tech Trash could do the same for a new generation of
technology’s products.
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