Tip of the hat to Salon for the post title.
The U.S. may be one of the world's biggest consumers of high-tech electronics, but unlike the European Union or Japan, the U.S. has no national system for handling e-waste.
For years, developed countries have been exporting tons of electronic waste to China for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling and disposal. Since 2000, it's been illegal to import electronic waste into China for this kind of environmentally unsound recycling. But tons of debris are smuggled in with legitimate imports, corruption is common among local officials, and China's appetite for scrap is so enormous that the shipments just keep on coming.
In Taizhou's outdoor workshops, people bang apart the computers and toss bits of metal into brick furnaces that look like chimneys. Split open, the electronics release a stew of toxic materials -- among them beryllium, cadmium, lead, mercury and flame retardants -- that can accumulate in human blood and disrupt the body's hormonal balance. Exposed to heat or allowed to degrade, electronics' plastics can break down into organic pollutants that cause a host of health problems, including cancer. Wearing no protective clothing, workers roast circuit boards in big, uncovered woklike pans to melt plastics and collect valuable metals. Other workers sluice open basins of acid over semiconductors to remove their gold, tossing the waste into nearby streams. Typical wages for this work are about $2 to $4 a day.
One of my biggest concerns about our society is the way we manage waste. The concept of burying waste in the ground strikes me as incredibly shortsighted. We bury materials that will not decompose for millions of years in landfills that cannot possibly handle the increasing volumes of garbage. Essentially what we do today is store materials in the ground for future generations to dig up, because we can only hope that future generations will develop better reclycing methods to recycle and reuse everything we consider waste today. It's easy to throw that plastic wrapper in the garbage and forget about it the moment it leaves your curbside, but it will continue to exist long after your enjoyment of that breakfast bar has faded.