Conscious Choice Seattle: Techin’ Out the Trash

October 2006 | Art & Soul

Techin’ Out the Trash

By Elizabeth Grossman

Ninety percent of all computers, cell phones and gadgets manufactured wind up dumped in landfill. Unfortunately, they don’t stay there. Let’s back up.

In the late ’90s it became politically correct to steer your 401k plan allocations in the direction of newly devised “green” funds—portfolio options loaded with high-flying tech firms. The idea was that tech was a clean industry, that tech, as opposed to traditional Wall Street titans like oil, utilities, auto and other heavy industry, didn’t poison the environment.

Now, some 10 years after the dawn of the dot-com boom, we’re slowly realizing that tech in general, and the fiercely expanding consumer electronics industry in specific, is anything but “clean” or politically correct. The proliferation of computers, cell phones, Playstations, printers, monitors, iPods, and other gadgets is the world’s fastest-growing and most ignored environmental problem.

One woman ringing the alarm and raising awareness is Elizabeth Grossman, author of High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health. Below is an excerpt from chapter one:

A harbor seal arcs her back and dives, a graceful comma of brown on the steel-blue water of San Francisco Bay. A school of herring darts through the saltwater off the coast of Holland. A polar bear settles down to sleep in a den carved out of Arctic ice. A whale cruises the depths of the North Sea and a chinook salmon noses her way into the Columbia on her way home to spawn. A seagoing tern lays an egg. A mother in Sweden nurses her baby, as does a mother in Oakland, California. Tissue samples taken from these animals and from these women’s breasts contain synthetic chemicals used to make the plastics in computers, televisions, cell phones and other electronics resist fire. Americans have the highest levels of these compounds in their blood of any people yet tested, and the same chemicals have been found in food purchased in grocery stores throughout the United States.

On the shores of the Lianjiang River in southern China, a woman squats in front of an open flame. In the pan she holds over the fire is a smoky stew of plastic and metal—a melting circuit board. With unprotected hands she plucks out the microchips. Another woman wields a hammer and cracks the glass of a computer monitor to remove the copper yoke. The lead-laden glass screen is tossed onto a riverside pile. Along the riverbank are enormous hillocks of plastic and metal, the discarded remains of electronic appliances that have been exported here for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling. A bare-legged child stands on one of the mounds eating an apple. At night, thick black smoke rises from a mountain of burning wires. In the Chinese city of Guiyu—one of the places where this primitive recycling takes place—approximately 80 percent of the city’s 150,000 residents are engaged in processing the million or more tons of electronic waste that have been arriving each year since the mid-1990s.

Mines that stretch for miles across the Arizona desert, tunnel deep under northern Sweden’s boreal forests and others on nearly every continent produce ore and metals that end up in electronic gadgets on desktops and briefcases, and pressed close to ears all around the world. Although mostly hidden, metals make up over half the materials in the world’s 900 million computers. Extracted and refined at great cost, about 90 percent of this metal is eventually thrown away and never used again.

Traffic between San Francisco and San Jose is bumper to bumper. Suburban developments stretch out against the backdrop of hills that frame the valley. Pooled beneath the communities of Santa Clara, Cupertino and Mountain View, California—to name but a few—are thousands of gallons of poisonous volatile organic compounds, including trichloroethylene (a solvent the Environmental Protection Agency recognizes as a carcinogen), left by the manufacture of semiconductors. Consequently, California’s Silicon Valley now has more federal Superfund sites than any other comparable sized region in the United States. It will take decades, if not a century or more, to complete the clean up.

Sitting at my desk in Portland, Oregon, the tap of a few keys on my laptop sends a message to Hong Kong, retrieves articles filed in Brussels, shows me pictures of my nieces in New York and plays the song of a wood stork recorded in Florida. Traveling with my laptop and cell phone, I have access to a whole world of information and personal communication—a world that exists with increasingly little regard to geography, as electricity grids, phone towers and wireless networks proliferate. This universe of instant information, conversation and entertainment is so powerful and absorbing—and its currency so physically ephemeral—that it’s hard to remember that the technology that makes it possible has anything to do with the natural world.

But this digital wizardry relies on a complex array of materials: metals, elements, plastics and chemical compounds—many of them hazardous or toxic. Each tidy piece of equipment has a story that begins in mines, refineries, factories, rivers and aquifers, and ends on pallets, in dumpsters and in landfills all around the world.

Thanks to our appetite for gadgets, convenience and innovation—and the current system of world commerce that makes them relatively affordable—Americans now own over two billion pieces of high-tech consumer electronics. With some five to seven million tons of this stuff becoming obsolete each year, high-tech electronics are now the fastest growing part of the municipal waste stream both in the United States and in Europe. In the U.S., about two million tons of e-waste is landfilled each year, and we recycle only about 10 percent of the electronics we discard. At least half of that equipment ends up overseas where much is processed under unhealthy and environmentally hazardous conditions.

The tangible impacts of e-waste and high-tech manufacturing may be out of sight for many people, but this is not a story of problems so remote they can be safely shelved. Nor is it an issue frothed up by advocates who yearn for simpler times. This is a story in which we all play a part, whether we know it or not. Information Age technology has linked the world as never before and benefits us all—but its debris and detritus span the earth as well. 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 Guiyu or a native of the Arctic, you are part of this story.

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