Lone Polar Bear Arctic Ice wallpaper, Digital switch may produce waste pile up

Lone Polar on Ice Sheet wallpaper

Officials, activists worry about discarded TVs piling up after digital switch

Americans have been creating up to 50 million tons of e-waste in recent years as they upgrade their technology. Now that tens of millions of old TVs have little or no value, they, too, may get tossed.

….That’s a tough task, according to the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, which says the nationwide rate of recycling was about 18 percent for the 27 million TVs and 206 million computers disposed of in 2007. And e-waste is the nation’s fastest growing municipal waste stream. Consumers bought 500 million electronic items last year, according to industry data.

The good news is that many cities like Baltimore have special drop off sites to recycle electronics. If you search your city+ electronic recycling sometimes you’ll get a hit for a local organization or commercial company that takes old electronics. The bad news is that much of our electronics waste ends up in regular landfills where it leaches toxic chemical into the ground or its exported to third world country where trash pickers break monitors and other parts into pieces to try and recover small bits of metal like copper to resell – the last is not a bad general concept, but frequently the toxic materials are not handled in a safe manner thus the collectors suffer the medical consequences.

Amazon deforestation leads to economic boom and bust

The researchers say the boom is probably due to a number of factors, including better roads and therefore better access to healthcare and schools. For a short while, the community benefits from the natural resources of the forest, and makes money off the timber and the farms that are set up in the cleared lands. But the soil is rapidly degraded making farming and cattle ranching unsustainable. “A lot of that land ends up being abandoned,” says Ewers. “The small scale cattle ranchers are likely to move on.”
Keeping the forests

Large farms do persist but “my guess is that a lot of that income goes to a wealthy few,” he adds. Because the soil is degraded, farms – mostly large soy farms – can only survive by importing fertilisers. They also tend to be highly mechanised and so do not employ many local people.

I literally read this in a college text book from the 90s so its not a new phenomenon, we just have a newer study that confirms old and disruptive business practices are as bad as ever. Native South American tribes are frequently pushed out. The timber harvested  and farms set up. Its a strange cycle of destruction in which figuring out a way to make an income off sustaining the forest and all its natural products is not considered.

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