e-waste

I had never really heard about recycling electronics until this Christmas when my sister was persistent about getting a recycled digital camera. I wasn't sure why she wanted one, since getting a brand new camera (rather than a refurbished one) was less expensive, but she brought up the point that the refurbished camera wouldn't end up in a landfill. I remember in my elementary school there was a collection for old ink cartridges, VHS tapes and batteries. Though there were bigger electronics out there at that point, I think that this was the beginning of electronics recycling for my generation.

I think its pretty disgusting that corporations ship their unwanted, toxic junk to poor countries. They just seem to dump their unwanted electronics and leave them for less powerful countries to deal with. From this, not only are environmental hazards faced, but health problems are arising because of people picking through scraps of electronics and burning them. Just breathing the air around these e-waste dumps is bad, but physical contact probably has to be much worse. I'm really not sure what I can further do to recycle my old electronics. My family is pretty good about recyling old cell phones or donating them to charities, and my parents go to special places to drop off old computers, etc. I think that it would be interesting for electronic companies and cell phone providers to give customers an incentive to recycle/dispose properly of their old cell phones rather than dumping them in the garbage. Maybe a discount on their new electronic, or something small that would encourage people to be more conscious about what they're doing to the earth. The Salon article said that only 10% of electronics in our country are recycled, which is pretty sad. I think that there could be a great impact on e-waste problems if that percent doubled or tripled, at least. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty surprised that USF doesn't have a program that addresses e-waste, since our school is really big on recycling/composting, though they really only target traditionally recycled materials (paper, plastic, glass). But maybe there is something like this going on that I'm unaware of. In the end, I think that everyones small steps towards becoming more aware and active about recycling electronics would/will be very beneficial to the environment and the people who are currently being affected by this growing problem.