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

Grossman, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559635541 ISBN 13: 9781559635547

Publisher: Shearwater Books, 2006

Synopsis

The Digital Age was expected to usher in an era of

clean production, an alternative to smokestack

industries and their pollutants. But as environmental

journalist Elizabeth Grossman reveals in this penetrating

analysis of high tech manufacture and disposal,

digital may be sleek, but it’s anything but

clean. Deep within every electronic device lie toxic

materials that make up the bits and bytes, a complex

thicket of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a

host of other often harmful ingredients.

High Tech Trash is a wake-up call to the importance of the e-waste issue

and the health hazards involved. Americans alone own more than two

billion pieces of high tech electronics and discard five to seven million

tons each year. As a result, electronic waste already makes up more than

two-thirds of the heavy metals and 40 percent of the lead found in our

landfills. But the problem goes far beyond American shores, most tragically

to the cities in China and India where shiploads of discarded electronics

arrive daily. There, they are “recycled”—picked apart by hand,

exposing thousands of workers and community residents to toxics.

As Grossman notes,“This is a story in which we all play a part, whether

we know it or not. 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 Guangdong, or a native of the Arctic, you are part of this story.”

The answers lie in changing how we design, manufacture, and dispose

of high tech electronics. Europe has led the way in regulating materials

used in electronic devices and in e-waste recycling. But in the

United States many have yet to recognize the persistent human health

and environmental effects of the toxics in high tech devices. If Silent

Spring brought national attention to the dangers of DDT and other

pesticides, High Tech Trash could do the same for a new generation of

technology’s products.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Watershed: The Undamming of America (Counterpoint 2002) and several other works. She had worked in communications for several environmental organizations, worked for some years as a literary agent, and now devotes full time to writing. She has written articles for Audubon, Amicus, Orion, and many other publications.

Reviews

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.

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.

Word is getting out about a metastasizing environmental and health threat: high-tech trash, or e-waste, our cast-aside computers and cell phones, devices dense with toxic substances. Environmental journalist Grossman takes readers on an eye-opening, even shocking tour of the cyber underground, clearly and methodically explicating the science, politics, and crimes involved in the mishandling of the ever-increasing tonnage of e-waste. Grossman tracks the entire electronics manufacturing process, from mining the heavy metals used in digital machines and gadgets to the serious yet underreported pollution generated by the production of silicon chips. Then there are alarming discoveries regarding the brominated flame retardants used in electronics, poisonous compounds now found in our food and our bodies, and the appalling conditions under which exploited laborers in China, India, and Nigeria break up and burn e-waste, absorbing deadly chemicals that are also released into rivers and the atmosphere. There is an urgent need for e-waste regulation, and Grossman's informative, harrowing, and invaluable report, as well as Giles Slade's Made to Break (2006) and Elizabeth Royte's Garbage Land (2005), are essential for informed public discourse and action. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Shearwater Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1559635541
• ISBN 13: 9781559635547
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352