Good evening dear followers. So this week I finally finished reading, "Made To Break" by Giles Slade. So in the end of this book I have learned for consumers, having the latest shiny, new gadget has become a way to "either feed one's pride or reduce one's shame," creating a self consciousness about being out of fashion and a tendency to evaluate others based on their possessions that has continued to this day. The book's final chapter, "Cell Phones and E-Waste," is perhaps the most disturbing to me. "Among its revelations: By 2002, more than 130 million still-working cell phones had been "retired" in the U.S." (p.263) "Today, about 250,000 tons of discarded but still usable cell phones sit in stockpiles in America, awaiting disposal" (p.264). Cell phones, Slade suggests, "have become the avant-garde of a fast-growing trend toward throwaway electronic products." And their lifespan is still declining. In Japan, where cell phone penetration is especially high, cell phones are discarded within a year in favor of newer models.
The increasingly short lifespan of digital devices; from computers to televisions and cell phones, is creating an avalanche of electronic consumer waste that threatens to overwhelm the world's landfills with a toxic soup of permanent biological toxins such as arsenic, lead, nickel and zinc. "When e-waste is burned anywhere in the world, dioxins, furans and other pollutants are released into the air, with potentially disastrous health consequences around the globe. When e-waste is buried in landfills, PBTs eventually seep into the groundwater, poisoning it," Slade writes.
Slade also examines the ways consumers use consumer electronics to shape their identities. For adolescents, cell phones are a way young people create communities outside of their family, Slade writes, citing research by sociologist Rich Ling. Ling's eye-opening study of adolescents describes in vivid detail teens' comparisons of cell phones to clothing; that certain brands of cell phones imply "coolness" while others are considered dated and conformist.
But it is cell phones' small size that makes them a toxic hazard to be reckoned with, Slade continues in Made to Break's brief ending about what can be done to resolve the problem of discarded consumer electronics. Taking apart tiny components to recover their parts isn't worth the effort, and so most cell phones are simply thrown away, ultimately finding their way into incinerators and landfills. Slade says in one interview about Made to Break, "A lot of really sophisticated people devoted a lot of time and thought to developing this system" of constant consumption. "We need to look at the problem creatively and rethink it. Our whole economy is based on buying, trashing and buying again. We need to rethink industrial design."
Made to Break, though a very interesting read, seems to end suddenly with no solutions proposed for everyday Americans to deal with a huge problem that has taken a century to create and that shows no signs of abating. But Slade also strikes a note of optimism. Soon enough, he says, the sheer volume of waste of all kinds will compel a change. "This is the industrial challenge of the new century. We must welcome it." (p.281)
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