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

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.

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.