The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [51]
My Computer
Collectively, Americans own more than 200 million computers, 200 million TVs, and around 200 million cell phones.51 I do have a laptop and a cell phone, but the truth is, I’m one of those people who is just not attracted to new electronic gizmos. The incessant beeping annoys me, and the thought of losing all my contact information or documents in a single zap gives me hives. I staunchly rely on my fifteen-year-old refillable paper appointment book, which has accompanied me to at least thirty countries, even though each year that passes it becomes increasingly difficult to find replacement pages, an endangered species. I love this well-worn, very unhip appointment book so much that once I even entered an essay contest sponsored by the company that made it. The first stanza of the poem I composed read: “It doesn’t light up; it doesn’t plug in. It doesn’t need batteries, has no secret PIN.” I prefer it to high-tech alternatives for all those reasons.
But before you write me off as a total Luddite, let me assure you I appreciate the positive contributions that electronics and computer technology make. I would be hard-pressed to manage without my cell phone today. I know electronic devices can help find lost kids and stranded hikers. In the hands of activists around the world, they document human rights abuses and disseminate alerts and warnings. Text messages and tweeting have alerted the media and support networks when people have been unjustly detained or harmed. And I would be a very unhappy camper without my computer, which helps me find and organize information, communicate with friends and colleagues, and write this book.
Yet the story of our electronics is extremely complicated. Those Apple advertisements make their products look so clean, simple, and elegant, don’t they? High-tech development is often cast as an improvement over the belching smokestacks of old-fashioned industries, but it actually just replaces the highly visible pollution of old with a less visible version.
The truth is, electronics production facilities are ecologically filthy, using and releasing tons of hazardous compounds that poison the workers and surrounding communities. Silicon Valley, less than fifty miles south of my home in Berkeley, has so many toxic contaminated sites linked to former high-tech development that it has among the highest concentration of Superfund sites in the country.52 (Superfund is the U.S. government’s list of sites so contaminated with toxins that they qualify for priority cleanup programs.) Much of the high-tech production has now moved out of Silicon Valley—seeking the lower wages and less stringent worker safety and environmental regulations in Asia and Latin America—but it has left behind a toxic legacy.
The famed high-tech wonderland of Silicon Valley is also a place of social extremes, with the mansions where Internet tycoons live butting up against rundown neighborhoods inhabited by the people who actually make electronic components—or who used to before the factories moved overseas. As computer companies strive to offer lower prices to consumers while maintaining their hefty profits, they increasingly focus their cost-cutting efforts on the stops along the supply chain. Big name brand computer companies are infamous for pressuring manufacturers and suppliers to lower expenses and prices and to lengthen working hours in order to make and sell the components cheaply. Michael Dell of Dell computers once said, “Our job is to be absolutely the best in the world at driving costs down.”53
Then there’s the back-end problem of electronic waste, or e-waste. As I’ll discuss further in the chapter on disposal, e-waste is a global