Download High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health AudioBook Free
The Digital Age was likely to usher within an time of clean creation, an alternative to smokestack industries and their contaminants. But as environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman shows in this penetrating analysis of hi-tech manufacture and removal, digital may be sleek, but it's not clean. Deep within every digital camera lie harmful materials that make up the pieces and bytes, a complicated thicket of business lead, mercury, cadmium, plastics, and a bunch of other often hazardous ingredients. High Technical Trash is a wake-up call to the importance of the e-waste concern and medical hazards involved. Americans only own more than two billion bits of high tech gadgets and discard five to seven million loads each year. Because of this, electronic throw away already accocunts for more than two-thirds of the heavy metals and 40 percent of the business lead found in our landfills. But the condition goes very good beyond American shores, most tragically to the towns in China and India where shiploads of discarded gadgets arrive daily. There, they can be "recycled" - picked apart by hand, exposing a large number of workers and community residents to toxics. As Grossman records, "This is a story where we all play a role, whether we know it or not. In the event that you stay at a workplace within an office, speak to friends on your cellular phone, watch television, pay attention to music on headphones, are a child in Guangdong, or a native of the Arctic, you are part of this account. "The answers rest in changing how we design, produce, and dispose of high tech gadgets. Europe has led the way in regulating materials found in gadgets and in e-waste recycling. But in the United States many have yet to identify the persistent human health and environmental effects of the toxics in hi-tech devices. If Silent Spring brought national focus on the risks of DDT and other pesticides, High Technical Trash could do the same for a new generation of technology's products.
