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Driven by built-in obsolescence and the desire of consumers for smaller, faster and sleeker hardware, millions of discarded plastic computer casings, lead-infused monitors, antiquated cellphones and even dead TV remote controls—the "effluent of the affluent"—are piling up annually in America's landfills, leaching dangerous toxins, including lead, mercury and arsenic, into the nation's water tables. Such cast-off "e-waste" is also being shipped to countries like India and China, where for pennies a day workers without masks or gloves boil circuit boards over primitive braziers to extract microchips (along with a slew of noxious elements), after which the silicon chips are bathed in open vats of acid to precipitate out micrograms of gold. In either instance, according to this alarming and angry study, the way in which America currently handles its cyber-age waste amounts to an ongoing but underreported environmental crisis. Grossman (Watershed: The Undamming of America) points to recycling regulations in Europe as models and demands that manufacturers of high-end technology assume more of the burden for safe disposal of discarded electronics. Her call for action is commendable and critical, but this book's often daunting jargon (pages are given over to a difficult discussion of different kinds of bromodiphenyl ethers and their varying impact on the environment) sometimes undercuts its passion. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Disposal bins for the cartridges used in computer printers are becoming commonplace in office-supply stores, and some manufacturers pay the postage for shipping spent cartridges back for proper handling, but what about old computers themselves? How dangerous is the material that goes into them, and what happens to it when the whole caboodle gets thrown out? In High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health (Island Press, $25.95), journalist Elizabeth Grossman issues a warning against "e-waste": plastics, batteries, flame-retardant chemicals and more. She notes that the environmental harms of the Digital Age "are now being felt by communities from the Arctic to Australia, with poorer countries and communities receiving a disproportionate share of the burden."
With its citizens using about a quarter of the world's computers, the United States should be a leader in figuring out how to minimize the harm they can do to ecosystems. But according to Grossman, as of the end of last year, the United States had "not even sketched out a national system for dealing with its high-tech trash." In an appendix, "How to Recycle a Computer, Cell Phone, TV, or Other Digital Device," she summarizes the resources now available to those with a cyber-conscience.
The Flip Side of the Digital Revolution
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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