Due July, 12th, 12:00pm CST
Maoxiaoying
4.docxE-Waste
Letture:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/
E-Waste Case Study
For most segments of US society, mobile phones are now ubiquitous. Preschool children can be more adept at using their parents’ phones than their parents are! Not long ago, people had only landline phones and paid per-minute fees for long-distance calls. Now a person can take a self-portrait photo with a cell phone in one country and post it on Facebook via the phone’s app, and a friend halfway around the world can view it on another cell phone a few seconds later and “like” it.
Mobile phone technology has made life around the world, for many, totally interconnected, more convenient, and in some instances, even safer. In the midst of the ubiquity of cell phones though, a rarely discussed issue lurks—what happens to the cell phone once someone has upgraded? Because the latest and greatest cell phones are quickly surpassed by new models, many people opt for a new phone when their contract comes to an end. This leads to a glut of technology that has not exhausted its lifespan. Cell phones can be donated for use in nonprofit services, or they can be dropped off in a box marked for recycling at big-box chain stores. But what happens to most cell phones when the original buyers are finished with them? A report in the New York Times indicates that people in the United States replace their cell phones every twenty-two months, and they discarded 150 million phones in 2010. The article explains that women and children in poor countries, where many of the phones are ultimately dumped, spend time picking through e-waste and burning it in order to collect the metals so they can sell them to a recycler. Most of the metals, such as lead, cadmium, and mercury, are toxic, so exposure to them endangers the health of those involved. In 2008 CBS’s 60 Minutes program investigated what happened to e-waste products (cell phones, tablets, and laptop computers) brought to a citywide recycling event in Denver, Colorado. They followed one container of computer monitors that was shipped to Hong Kong, in violation of US and Hong Kong laws. The monitors ended up in a small town in southern China where people take apart the e-waste and burn it. The town is almost uninhabitable due to poor air and water quality, and those who live there suffer the consequences of the highly toxic environment: high-lead blood level in 70 percent of children and six times higher-than-average rates of miscarriages.
According to an article in Fast Company, 17,000 tons of e-waste is thrown away or recycled every day. This article gives many different infographics on why and how e-waste can be recycled. It claims that in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain, about 15 percent of e-waste is recycled, which is a higher percentage than in other countries. The article argues that recycling is important because in every one million mobile phones, there are “9 kilograms of palladium, 24 kilograms of gold, 250 kilograms of silver, and 9,000 kilograms of copper.” The article goes on to argue that it’s easier to recoup these metals than to mine new ones and this is an area of business that can be greatly expanded and create many jobs.
