E-Waste Blog

E-Waste is something that I never even thought about until taking this class. I assumed that you could just throw away electronics like everything else, and have done that up until this point. As a matter of fact, during the lecture, every time a computer monitor or cell phone or laptop was mentioned, I could remember numerous times that I threw one of those things in a trash can or a dumpster. It was shocking to me to realize that something that I have never thought of as being a problem was actually such a huge one.
Probably the one thing that struck me the most are the people who are effected by this, because, I suppose, as with most toxic materials, it doesnt directly effect the people in our own country. I was again, shocked to hear and see about the people in the third world whose sole means of meager income was to harvest and live in this toxic material coming from machines that they have never even used or seen in action before. In one of the slides shown in class, I think it was said that in that particular villiage, because of the toxic materials in the area, the water was not even drinkable. Are you kidding me?! An entire villiage has to pay to import the most basic neccesity needed for life, because machines they have never used have destroyed thier own supply? That is rediculous. I know that someone has to do it, but I mean...come on. How is this not some kind of huge issue? That cannot even be blamed on nature or anything! This is a purely man caused environmental disaster! Which leads to, i suppose, the idea of how to manage this kind of distruction.
I really see no quick fix to this problem, for several reasons. First, every country has different regulations on what you can import and export, and how it can be transported. So if the US is allowed to export thier technical waste say, to China, and it gets there, and China cant import the waste in that state, then it gets sent off to somewhere where they dont care. Welcome to countries such as Nigeria. Now imagine all of the other countries out there that are running into the same problem? With the rate that technology is advancing, E-Waste is at an all time high, and there is no end in sight. How to solve that problem? Seeing as how we cant get seperate countries to agree on ANYTHING, EVER, I see no quick solution to this problem. The other problem is that all of this has to go somewhere, and there will always be a market to do it cheap. That is just how the world works. Its the same way with regular waste. Even the most presitgious nation needs to save money where it can, and sometimes that means taking the cheap route, which may or may not result in computer parts being thrown into third world countries. Don't believe it? How else does a truck load of computer parts sent off to be recycled end up in Nigeria in a unsafe toxic computer waste dump?! As long as it costs money, I'm telling you, this is going to be a huge problem.