Overview

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.

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9781597263856

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Reviews

Grossman manages to create a coherent, informative and scary narrative out of the births and deaths of electronics from TVs and cell phones to computer monitors and iPods. - WIRED NEWS This is the dark side of Being Digital, the flip side of Wired magazine's bright outlook, and Grossman does an excellent job of exploring it. - E MAGAZINE Informative, harrowing, and invaluable...essential for informed public discourse and action. - BOOKLIST We depend on writers like...Elizabeth Grossman...to shake us awake, dispel the fever dream of consumerism and reveal the true cost of our love for technology and our obsession with machines and disposable goods. - THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE Lizzie Grossman is among our most intrepid environmental sleuths - here she uncovers the answer to one of the more toxic questions of our time. - BILL MCKIBBEN, AUTHOR OF THE END OF NATURE

Author Information

Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Watershed: The Undamming of America and Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail and co-editor of Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Salon, The Nation, Orion, High Country News, and other publications.

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