Customer Reviews

High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health

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An eye opening account of just how much raw material it takes to make your favorite electronic gizmos and what can be done to reduce their environmental footprint. Normally books like this come off as scathing polemics; however, Grossman does an excellent job of explaining why things are the way they are, what recycling methods are working, and what can be done better. Perhaps the saddest fact of the entire book is just how recyclable modern electronic could be, and how little of them is actually recycled.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in an objective, complete account of the electronic circle: raw materials, manufacturing, and waste. Elizabeth Grossman follows the trail from the mining and semiconductor companies to the third world countries where our discarded laptops and iPods end up. Although the title and first chapter have a grim tone, the book does offer a lot of hope.

High Tech Trash makes a good companion piece to Elizabeth Royte's book,Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. Royte takes a much more personal approach to waste, writing very vivid descriptions of personalities and environments she encounters along the way. Grossman's work is more scientific and removed from the personal, attempting to fill every cranny with statistics and quotes. Although they are not exactly the same book, both cover common ground with differing styles that result in a complete picture of the US waste stream.

This makes High Tech Trash relevant to those who want to purely conduct research. I not only found out the exact chemical makeup of most motherboards but also their effects on the environment and human health. The author does a good job keeping her own personal feelings on a leash - a hard task to do when you swim through these kind of waters. Unlike the corporate demonizing that takes place in Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, High Tech Trash explores everyone's failures (governmental, social, corporate) to an exhaustive degree. This is the kind of book that will give you plenty to think about, a lot of anger over our current e-waste situation, but also plenty of ways to use that energy to improve our system and make things better.

Fairly quickly into this book I was comparing it to Silent Spring and to Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy.

This is a brilliant elegant work. If you agree with its premises it is a fast read, ending with an appendix on how to recycle electronic waste, and a truly superb bibliography. This is a serious book, a PhD level accomplishment, and totally objective and meritorious.

I am particularly impressed that Apple accepts its computer back for recycling in Japan, something we need to demand here. Indeed, if Apple and CISCO (for its routers and hubs) were to commit to total recycling, what is called for in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming and described in more detail in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things I for one would immediately switch my business and my office to iPhone, MacIntoch, and Open Office from Sun (on verge of being fully implementable within Apple's operating system).

Other books on my top ten:
Where to find 4 billion new customers: expanding the world's marketplace; Smart companies looking for new growth opportunities should consider broadening ... consultant.: An article from: The Futurist (Forthcoming as a book, see my keynote to Gnomedex, "Open Everything"
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits
The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System
Diet for a Small Planet
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Thank God for Evolution!: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World

This addition to the literature is needed. For those with a "new awakening" to what is happening to the environment or those who need a source of facts and factoids, the book is a valuable resource. The image selected for the cover is perfect...if you find the cover alarming or disgusting, you will find the scenarios in the book to be the same.

"High Tech Trash" by Elizabeth Grossman is an eye-opening account of the mounting environmental costs of living in a technology-dependent society. As Rachel Carson had once sounded the alarm about the dangers of chemical contamination to a prior generation, Ms. Grossman succeeds in exposing one of today's most underreported environmental problems in a persuasive and compelling manner. The author's carefully structured thesis is invigorated with skillful writing and narrative flair, creating both an intelligent and accessible work that should appeal to a wide audience. Through her careful research and analysis, we understand that greater regulation of the production and disposal of high tech equipment is urgently needed in the U.S. if we wish to avoid poisoning ourselves with the detritus of our wasteful consumerist culture.

Ms. Grossman points out that our blissful ignorance of the underside of high tech may be partly the result of years of carefully crafted industry hype about the supposed immateriality of our modern world. Ms. Grossman methodically debunks such claims while vividly and memorably describing her sometimes harrowing visits to mining sites where raw materials such as copper, gold and other minerals that are essential to producing electronic products are extracted from the ground using highly destructive and polluting practices. The author visits several semiconductor manufacturing sites where water is withdrawn at unsustainable rates and discharged into local rivers in a fouled condition. She goes on to travel to so-called 'clean room' facilities where the legacies of soil and water pollution have led to illness and financial hardship in a number of communities. Discussing the probable link between increased cancer incidents among factory workers and the innocent people who happened to live near some of these plants, Ms. Grossman argues forcefully for the U.S. to adopt the precautionary principle while demonstrating how nearly all of us may be vulnerable to exposure.

We learn that the problem of dealing with obsolete and broken electronic equipment, or 'e-waste', has been recognized by some industrialized countries but not by the U.S., whose patchwork of local laws are woefully inadequate to the task even if they are not well understood by citizens. Ms. Grossman compares and contrasts the practices of recyclers both in the U.S. and overseas; these range from the primitive conditions that sometimes exist in poor countries such as China where materials are often dismantled under hazardous conditions to modern, state-of-the-art facilities in Sweden and the U.S. where used electronics are handled under safe and controlled conditions. We come to appreciate the important role that responsible recyclers can play in recovering precious metals, plastics, glass and toxic materials from discarded equipment, which in turn can help us reduce the adverse effects of disposal on the environment and ourselves. Indeed, the author's common-sense arguments are presented with such clarity and power that inaction seems absurd: one concludes that there is simply no good reason for the U.S. not to implement a cradle-to-grave producer responsibility system for electronic products that includes easily accessible and affordable recycling options for consumers.

I highly recommend this important book to everyone.

Producing a single two-gram microchip can produce dozens of pounds of waste. In addition, Americans discard 5-7 million tons of high-tech electronics each year.

In the U.S. about one third of copper used is scrap, but less than 10% comes from post-consumer sources. Overall, mining accounts for an estimated 7-10% of the world's energy consumption, and releases considerable contaminants in refining and slag piles. Thus, the roughly 2 lbs. of copper used in a desktop computer involves about 620 pounds of waste rock. (Expert studies believe 85% of copper could be recycled, while only 10% used in high-tech electronics actually is.)

Similarly with gold: One metric ton of circuit boards can contain 40-800X the concentration of gold ore mined in the U.S. - yet, only 30% of the gold used comes from scrap - mostly jewelry. (Note: This is a non-sequitur, as are some other comparisons provided.)

Silicon Valley, our major U.S. high-tech producer, has more Superfund sites than any other U.S. count. Analyses of various products is made quite complicated by the need to insure comparable life-cycle detail (how far back in a product's creation does one go), changing technology and volumes, and the involvement of often new, proprietary chemicals for which we lack standards and knowledge of their consequences.