In the classic play and film
The Odd Couple, there is a classic exchange between neatnik Felix (Jack Lemmon) and slob Oscar (Walter Matthau):
Oscar: Now kindly remove that spaghetti from my poker table.
(Felix laughs)
Oscar : The hell’s so funny?
Felix: It’s not spaghetti, it’s linguini.
(Oscar picks up the linguini and hurls it against the kitchen wall)
Oscar: Now it’s garbage.
Some of us, in fits of pique (usually involving one too many dropped calls), have reenacted this scene with a cellphone (I had a Verizon phone some years ago that dramatically came apart when I hurled it down a flight of stairs), but even without such violence, our portable devices end up as garbage a lot sooner than is environmentally sound.
I only just this weekend made it through the May issue of
Scientific American, and David Pogue’s May column
“Gadgets Are Garbage” addresses a topic familiar to the Going Green-o-sphere: e-waste. That is, Mr. Pogue bemoans the fact that there has been no public outcry against it:
The Environmental Protection Agency calculated that in 2007, we threw away 2.25 million tons of electronics—82 percent of it into the landfill. That’s a lot of toxic chemicals and nasty metals that you really, really don’t want leaching into the water supply.
So where’s the public outcry? Where are the public service announcements, the lobbyists, the national consciousness-raising? It doesn’t exist, for one simple reason: the disposability at the heart of the industry’s business model is too attractive to all concerned.
...
Neither we nor the manufacturers have any incentive to change. They’re not going to try to sell fewer products, and we wouldn’t want them to. Will there ever be a rally where people chant, “Stop improving the gadgets” and “Slow down the pace of progress”?
Well, I sometimes do. It drives the neighbors nuts.
He points out that Apple actually has taken the lead, by making available
environmental impact statements for all its products. And Sprint has just announced an
ambitious plan to conquer its own e-waste by 2017.
Happily, it’s getting easier to recycle our gadgets—more and more of the big box retailers like Best Buy, Target, Radio Shack, and Staples—will take e-waste and recycle it. Some even give you store credit for doing so. Mr. Pogue also recommends
Gazelle.com, a “recommerce” site that pays you for your e-easte, then resells or recycles it. I have not used Gazelle, but the next time I do a “device purge” I will look into them.
Another strategy would be to allow older mobile devices—such as cellphones—to remain in active use as “extra lines” or backup units. When I upgraded my original iPhone to the the iPhone 4, I was hoping to be able to use the older unit as a backup in case something happened to my primary iPhone. Alas, no such luck. (As it is, it is now relegated to an iPod for the car. Now, what do do with that older iPod that
had been in the car.)
As Mr. Pogue points out, this may all be a moot point in a few years as these technologies and their feature sets become mature and there is no real need to upgrade every couple of years. Take our computers and laptops (please!). Do we replace them as frequently as we used to?
But then, I’m sure there will be some
new class of electronics that will emerge and create its own environmental problems when it becomes garbage. Such is progress.
