By 2002, more than 130 million still-working portable phones were retired in the United States. Cell phones have now achieved the dubious distinction of having the shortest life cycle of any electronic consumer product in the country, and their lifespan is still declining. In Japan, they are discarded within a year of purchase. Cell phones have become the avant-garde of a fast- electronic products. Not only are rates of cellphone replacement rapidly increasing- growing trend toward throwaway previous estimates of maximum market penetration are proving accurate. In 2000, marketing experts predicted that, at most, 75 countries would own a cell phone in the near future. But, as one study has since pointed to 80 percent of people in industrialized out, in some countries such as Japan, Finland, and Norway, penetration w exceed 100 percent within the next few years, and "within a few years having just one cell phone will seem as odd to most people as owning a single pair of shoes."
In other words, cell phone e-waste is growing exponentially because people who already have cell phones are replacing them with newer models, people who do not have cell phones already are getting their first ones (which they too will replace within approximately eighteen months), and, at least in some parts of the world, people who have only one cell phone are getting a second or third. Such a pattern renders the term obsolescence itself obsolete. It makes no sense to call a discarded but working phone obsolete when the same make and model is still available for purchase and continues to provide excellent service to its owners. In 2005, about fifty thousand tons of these so-called obsolete phones were "retired." and only a fraction of them were disassembled for reuse. Altogether, about 250,000 tons of discarded but still-usable cell phones sit in stockpiles in America, awaiting dismantling or disposal. We are standing on the precipice of an insurmountable e-waste storage problem that no landfill program so far imagined will be able to solve.
How does e-waste happen? Modem consumers tend to value whatever is new and original over what is old, traditional, durable, or used. Advertising and other marketing strategies have helped create this preference by encouraging dissatisfaction with the material goods we already have, and emphasizing the allure of goods we do not yet own. When dissatisfaction and desire reach a peak, we acquire the new and discard the old. Electronic waste is simply the most extreme version of this consumer behavior In the words of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition: "Where once consumers ptirchased a stereo console or television set with the expectation that it would last for a decade or more, the increasingly rapid evolution of technology has effectively rendered Contemporary critics generally blame advertisers alone for the perpetual dissatisfaction that fuels our disposable.'" everything throw away culture. The average American, one analyst has noted, will have watched more than three years of television advertising by the end of his life. Despite this shocking amount of lifetime exposure to TV ads, blaming the rapacity of advertising is simplistic. Although Yance Packard's conspiracy theory consumption entirely on manipulative Americans alarmed America when it first appeared in The Hidden Persuaders, forty years later his explanation is demonstrably incomplete. In particular, it ignores what one sociologist of consumerism, Colin Campbell, has described as the "mystery" of modern consumption itself ts character as an activity which involves an apparently endless pursuit of wants, the most characteristic feature of modern consumption being this insatiability."
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