E-waste: From tech revolution to trash tsunami

"These come from trees." Perhaps you've noticed this sticker on a bathroom paper towel dispenser near you.  The idea is to remind drippy-handed folks that these convenient little disposable sheets were once, not so long ago, alive and thriving in a forest. Or, what about the fish image spray-painted next to a storm sewer grate? Ever come across one of those? The fish are supposed to remind would-be sewer dumpers that what one adds to a sewer, one also adds to the aquatic environment in which fish, and lots of other aquatic life, live.

So, I have something for you to ponder as you celebrate the various screens in your life (the style and/or number of which may very well have changed over the holidays): nothing in our lives is in more desperate need of a reminder about a product's origins (AKA "cradle") and its final resting place (AKA "grave") than our screens and associated gadgets.  Why such urgency? Because the technology revolution has meant that our voracious consumption of electronics has been matched by an unprecedented flow of electronic or "E-waste".

For example, a 2008 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) study revealed that the manufacturing of a computer and its screen takes at least 240 kg (530 pounds) of fossil fuels, 22 kg (48 pounds) of chemicals and 1.5 tonnes of water "more than the weight of a rhinoceros or a car". That's the cradle part. It takes a lot of resources to create our electronics. But it's the rate at which we are buying electronics, and sending old ones to their grave, that really warrants attention.

According to a 2008 Environmental Protection Agency report, Americans trashed (i.e. landfilled or incinerated) 205.5 million units of "computer products" (CPUs, monitors, notebooks, keyboards, mice and "hard copy peripherals" such as printers, copiers and fax machines) – that's more than 112,000 discarded computers per day. Add to that over 140 million cell phones and almost 27 million televisions annually discarded.  And while these are American statistics, Canadians are a part of the 50 million tons of E-waste that UNEP calculated was dumped/incinerated in 2007 (and by all accounts these numbers have only increased over the years).   

Attempts are being made to recycle components of this E-waste, but UNEP estimates that less than 20 per cent of the computer products and televisions, and less than 10 per cent of cell phones, get taken apart and "mined" for their bits of valuable innards (bits of gold, silver, palladium, copper).We might think that we should just recycle more, but the problem is that even these relatively small attempts at recycling this "effluent of the affluent" is wreaking environmental havoc in impoverished parts of the world.  As Greenpeace highlights, E-waste is dumped, "often illegally, from the Europe, U .S ., Japan and other industrialised countries, to Asia, [and, increasingly, to parts of Africa and India as well]. There, workers at scrap yards, some of whom are children, are exposed to a cocktail of toxic chemicals and poisons." So, while we know from the "three Rs" (reduce, reuse, recycle) that trying to safely recycle electronics makes sense, illegally sending off our waste to other parts of the world pretty much guarantees this isn't happening.

Of course I understand that reusing your existing electronics, and reducing your overall consumption of electronics, is the last thing you want to hear as you gleefully celebrate your newest gadget, but we all need to be reminded that the price of our voracious appetite for electronics goes far beyond the money you, or a loved one, paid for it. And, I'm not sure what the sticker should say that reminds us of the resources that went into creating our gadgets, or what icon might remind us of the huge impact our gadgets have once they leave our hands, but we urgently, desperately, need to be reminded.