High-Tech Trash by Chris Carroll

After reading the essay High-Tech Trash by Chris Carroll from National Geographic, I thought about all the tech devices that I have discarded in my lifetime and thought to myself, could one of the millions of old monitors, cell phones, CPU's the author saw on muddy track in Ghana be one of mine? I am guilty of adding to the High-Tech Trash the author writes about and saw with his own eyes. I really never thought much about where all the old tech stuff goes after it's short life in the consumers hands. I can remember one day at my old job when a company donated their old monitors to the school. We went through the building and replaced so many of the really old monitors with the newer ones we received. The old monitors were to be picked up and discarded, there must have been over 25 at least. I really didn't give much thought to how they would be recycled, I wished I would have asked. I hope that they went to the Creative Recycling Systems company mentioned in the essay that recycles High-Tech trash safely here in America but I fear that they could have ended up in Carroll's trash in Ghana.

The author writes that we ship off most of our tech trash in America overseas to save money as it is too costly to recycle here. The buck is most certainly passed out of here, but at what cost to the environment, to the thousands of people that have been exposed to very serious toxins, to our "Go Green" pride? Why is that we need to save a dollar on something so serious? I am surprised that the government hasn't imposed a "Tech" tax where you have to pay an extra tax for the purchase of a high tech gadget or even have the manufacturers pay a tax to off set the extra money it would cost to safety dispose of the products and stop shipping them off. We have to pay a fee for the recycling of rubber tires why not a tech fee?
Why did we not see this coming? Why is Microsoft, Google, IBM, all the tech companies who make trillions of dollars on the backbone of the High-Tech trash not coming up with solutions. Why do we not create more of the recycling companies Carroll writes about in his essay and give Americans jobs and at the same time safety dispose of the trash? I feel that I have so many more questions than answers.

Carroll's essay is eye opening and informative, I am unsure of how many people have read this, but I would like to see it on the front page of the newspaper and have our current Presidential Administration take a hard stand on this problem. Perhaps dumping a days worth of "High-Tech Trash" on the floor of the Capital would make a point. I see it only getting worse by the second, as technology advances at lightening speed. Just recently in the news, the iPad was launched and after reading the reviews, they very well may end up in the trash before we know it and tomorrow yet again another high-tech device will be launched and so on and so on...I will end this post by saying...I have to go and take out the trash!