(slow upbeat music) - Worldwide, 1.7 billion smartphones are sold in one year. - What you're buying is so much more than what's in your hand. You're buying a lot of impacts. The model we have in our capitalist world is to sell you stuff, right? - E-waste, or electronic waste, is a huge global problem that's growing every year. But fixing it is gonna take more than telling people they shouldn't upgrade their phones. - Manufacturers have convinced everybody that recycling is benign. Don't worry, buy it, just recycle it, not a problem, and they're designing things for the dump, basically. - To stop toxic e-waste from piling up by the millions of tons, our devices need to be built to be more upgradable, more fixable, and more recyclable. The question is, can we redesign our devices to have the best in tech and the best for our planet? Smartphones, computers, monitors.

everything internet of things. Once they're thrown
out, they become e-waste, and the world is generating
e-waste at an alarming clip. I could give you numbers, but they're so astronomically
they won't mean much. More than 50 million metric tons every year are produced, and that's growing. While most of us stop
thinking about our smartphones around the time the battery gives out, Jim Puckett, founder of
the Basel Action Network, is most concerned with
everything that happens to them afterwards. If you can imagine people
get rid of their computers every three years, maybe they get rid of their phones
about every two years. Just multiply that by
every human on earth. It's a mountain, a very
large mountain of e-waste. ♪ Gotta learn to reduce, reuse, recycle. ♪ Reduce, reuse, recycle
is a nice term of art, but the reduction side of it, which is the most important,
is always forgotten.

It all ends up recycling. Probably about half of
your old electronics go to the global South, and it's justified by saying, well, we're gonna give it another life. They can fix it in the market there, which sounds really good. But a lot of the time, they can't fix it. Sometimes the components
inside our devices wear out too quickly or are stuck together with glue instead of screws to make them a hair thinner
than the competition. Instead of finding a second
life in the global South, our toxic e-waste might
find its way to a landfill. We knew that we had to track this waste to really tell the story about it. We did a program where
we went out to recyclers in the US and dropped computing equipment with a GPS tracker inserted into it. What they found was pretty incredible. 40% of the e-waste that
was supposed to be recycled in the US got shipped
to junkyards overseas. There's no pollution control.

and most of these are in Southeast Asia, in farmlands, so they're contaminating a lot of the local food supply. - BAN went public with their GPS data. - Blew people's minds because
they were like caught, and of course, it's made the industry really behave a lot better. Now we have a program called E-Stewards, which is a certification
program for the good guys. - The process still isn't perfect, but the E-Stewards recyclers employ a number of strict practices to make recycling safer and more environmentally friendly. Cascade Asset Management is one of those E-Stewards recyclers. - We process about
300,000 to 400,000 pounds of electronics per month, so we're moving a lot of
equipment through here. - Cascade is able to fix and
resell 30% of its inventory before recycling even comes into play. But the pace of change
in today's technology can be hard to keep up with. - We're starting to see
a lot more smartphones

and tablets coming through, some items maybe only
two or three years old, and there's no life left in them. - When I grew up, you'd buy a toaster or refrigerator would
last at least 20 years, but the manufacturers
don't design the equipment to last a long time, so in effect, they're
planning its obsolescence. Sure, electronics change quickly, but they can anticipate upgrades. Do we really need to have
things die so quickly? - You've probably been told before that you should buy less stuff, that you should consume more consciously, but in order to empower
consumers to make that choice, manufacturers need to design
things to last longer. Right now, that's a tough sell to most of the big companies
making our electronics, but some startups are taking notice. - I've been in the electronics industry for the last 11 years, and I realized there's hardly any repair. Let's say if I were to buy a new device, the charging port stops working,

but it's almost like a moral dilemma. Do I get this repaired,
or do I buy a new device? - Sharad Mittal, founder
of the smartphone company Teracube, saw a third option. Make a phone that's actually
built to last a long time and easy to repair. The result is a device that's much more environmentally friendly. - Teracube 2e. It works
like any other smartphone. It's an Android smartphone, runs all the apps that are available from Google Play store. We have put in recycled plastics
into the body of the phone. The unique feature is the four-year payment care warranty. There's no glue used, so
anyone can take them apart, and we'll make the spare parts available so people can do their
own repairs as well. - Modular components and durable materials are just a couple of ways manufacturers can help consumers stay current without throwing their entire device away. Organizations like iFixit are also encouraging more companies
to make technical guides.

and spare phone parts
available to every user in order to encourage people
to repair their own devices. - You know, we think
we live in a democracy, but what we're able to buy, that changes our world more
than politics, believe it or not. Everything is becoming
electronic these days. Can't we make things last longer and still have innovation? - Us building the Teracube,
we've shown that it's possible. We are here to make a change. (slow upbeat music) Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you liked it, share it with some friends.  And check out Freethink.com for more stories of people  moving the world.

The Ugly Truth About Toxic E-Waste

Exploring the collision of technology, business and society. Curious / Thoughtful / Open / Constructive. Changing media with @bigthink. 



The Ugly Truth About Toxic E-Waste

Scripts