High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health by Elizabeth Grossman

From Barnes & Noble

For most people, the word "pollution" conjures up images of spewing smokestacks and liquid waste; but according to environmental journalist Elizabeth Grossman, a more insidious pollution is festering in our midst. High Tech Trash is her full-blast wake-up call about the toxic properties of electronic device waste. Each year, Americans discard 5-7 million tons of high-tech "e-trash," a deadly cyber-stew of lead, mercury, cadmium, plastic, and other health hazards. Grossman shows how this menace penetrates far beyond our shores; every day in China and India, shiploads of discarded high-tech devices are "recycled" by hand, exposing thousands of workers and residents to toxins. Her book is a Silent Spring for the new millennium.

From the Publisher

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 thepersistent 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.

Publishers Weekly

Driven by built-in obsolescence and the desire of consumers for smaller, faster and sleeker hardware, millions of discarded plastic computer casings, lead-infused monitors, antiquated cellphones and even dead TV remote controls-the "effluent of the affluent"-are piling up annually in America's landfills, leaching dangerous toxins, including lead, mercury and arsenic, into the nation's water tables. Such cast-off "e-waste" is also being shipped to countries like India and China, where for pennies a day workers without masks or gloves boil circuit boards over primitive braziers to extract microchips (along with a slew of noxious elements), after which the silicon chips are bathed in open vats of acid to precipitate out micrograms of gold. In either instance, according to this alarming and angry study, the way in which America currently handles its cyber-age waste amounts to an ongoing but underreported environmental crisis. Grossman (Watershed: The Undamming of America) points to recycling regulations in Europe as models and demands that manufacturers of high-end technology assume more of the burden for safe disposal of discarded electronics. Her call for action is commendable and critical, but this book's often daunting jargon (pages are given over to a difficult discussion of different kinds of bromodiphenyl ethers and their varying impact on the environment) sometimes undercuts its passion. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Those PCs, VCRs, TVs, and cell phones we replace or discard at the end of their useful lives wind up going to the dump (we think) if they don't get pushed to the back of the closet, and few are actually recycled in a safe manner. But as environmental journalist Grossman reveals in this engaging book, these everyday symbols of the 21st century rely on toxic materials (e.g., lead, mercury, chlorine, flame retardants) born of complex mining operations and chemical reactions, both of which can degrade the environment and affect human health. Grossman follows the trail of electronic waste from landfills in the United States to "recycling" centers in India and China where workers pick apart these products and thereby are exposed to pollutants. Her language is quiet, clear, and compelling as she argues that we follow the European model of regulating materials used in electronic products and e-waste recycling. Strongly recommended for all collections, particularly ecology and environmental collections.-Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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