The E-Waste Problem

in the toilet. Okay, this is frightening, Lee, similar to something that actually did happen to me last month ago. Ahead, you fish it out of the toilet. It doesn't work. No, it don't work no more. You try, you try all the tricks, you put it in a bag of rice, to do all that stuff. It's just it's good. It's yeah, it's so you go get you a new one. Sure, but what do you do with the old one? I'll just toss it out the door, don't I out the window? Yeah,

you know, just you know, to let it be free. Gone. A little Enjroid Way goes to live on a farm with a bunch of us, along with all of my other gadgets, like my entire Tway six hundred is out there. They're gonna all have a grand old time. Yeah. You know, our lives are just full of amazing technology that we sometimes we take it for granted. We we just do not have the correct level of appreciation for what our

devices can do. I actually, today, literally the day we're recording this, there was a moment where I was I was um swiping through my Twitter feed and watching as videos were auto playing with no no sound. But we're auto playing the video as I'm going through, holding this device in my hand and thinking, when I was a kid, we would never even dream that our computers would be able to do this, much less something that I can hold in my hand and carry around with me everywhere.

So once in a while we have those moments or we have that realization of wow, this is amazing. But I agree, most of the time it's just this thing that we have. But despite how amazing these devices are, they all, you know, they come to an end of term at some point. They break that whether you drop them in a toilet or it's just time to upgrade, you know. So I've got some kind of slow Yeah, I've got some stuff I want to talk about as

far as that goes. So, according to a Gallop survey that was done in of Americans upgrade their smartphones as soon as their provider allows for it, which is usually every two years UM, about two percent will upgrade before that time. I bet a lot of them. This is just wild. Guess are big fans of a company that rhymes with schmapple um just because Apple comes out with a new iPhone every year. This is anecdotal, so it's

completely worthless. But I do know people who will buy the latest iPhone every year rather than wait out the two years that typically most people would go with. I don't even know what's the difference. What what? What's the latest iPhone got that the one before it didn't have pixels like more of them and they're better. So yeah, processor tends to be faster, it tends to be thinner.

The screen size usually there's some difference in that, though it doesn't necessarily always get larger each generation, but the last one, the iPhone six plus sterre did so. At any rate, You've got some folks who are replacing these devices pretty quickly, which leads to the question what happens to the old ones, but that's just phones. Total cost of ownership studies actually suggest that you should replace your computer about every four years because, yeah, because your computer

will gradually get less and less efficient over time. It just happens, because that's what happens with electronics. You'll also be able to run fewer pro grams because they will require greater power or greater capabilities than your old piece of crap machine can do. So I don't even know why you hang onto that thing. You need to you need to put it out the pasture along with my old android phone. What is this? Uh? This is uh pages law right? Yeah, yeah, there are a couple of

different ones that play into this. But yes, uh that as a as processors become faster, software becomes slower. Yeah, well, because if you have the ability, like you suddenly think, oh, I've got all this extra power, I can build in all these features that before we're making the computer grind to a halt, but now we'll just go at a very slow trudge. Um So also, after I just had a weird thought, sorry, at what point will will our hardware be so fast that people won't even bother to

remove malware? It's just like, ah, you know, that's just the only two percent of my process. It will be fine. Um. I guess it depends on how efficient the malware is. But most PCs are designed to last about five years. Um that you know, that's just the way that they're being built. And you can have a PC last much longer than that. Uh. I think the PC I own is getting up there, but I don't have a huge pressing need to upgrade to something better just yet. Still,

I know that that will one day happen. Um. And then we often find ourselves in a world where we're encouraged to re replace or augment the stuff we have with new stuff. I mean, that's kind of that consumerist approach. Uh. It's everything you see in advertising. Plus, we're getting into a world where more and more smart devices are are becoming available, everything from light bulbs to major appliances and

and everything in between. Um. And this ultimately starts to create a really big problem that we've kind of alluded to. What do you do with the old stuff, whether it's broken or it's just outdated, it's obsolete, What do you do with it? How can you dispose of that responsibly? Because as it turns out, this stuff is, it's got some nasty elements in it. Yeah. So this has been referred to, I guess in the media as the e waste problem, the electronic waste problem, and it's a little

bit different than our standard waste problem. I guess you could say it's a subset of it, but it has some different concerns. Uh So, of course, the standard waste problems are, you know, you've got stuff you don't want anymore. You can't keep it in your house, so you get you put it in the garbage garbage garbage carriers come and take it away, and they take it somewhere and

you don't have to deal with it anymore. But you better hope that when they take it away, it's being dealt with in a way that's not creating more problems for your society, for the planet we live on, and just just being a nuisance in general. Yeah. So, in other words, it might just go to a landfill. Some of it could end up getting incinerated, and considering some of the stuff that's in electronics, that can be bad because it can release those toxins into the atmosphere, into

the local water supply. You can start doing serious damaged to ecosystems, to people, it's a real issue. And so when talking specifically about electronic waste, these old devices, there are some materials you will often find in them. Yeah, and and this is where we really have to pay attention, right. These are things that you don't want to have a lot of extensive contact with if you have the choice. And you might think, well, how much could how much

toxic material could my smartphone have inside of it? Truth is very little, It's not a whole lot, But you've gotta take this all as a whole. These are there. There are thousands upon thousands of electronic devices being disposed of every year. We'll get into those numbers in a minute, right, And and from depending upon who you believe, more than half of it ends up going to landfills, which means potentially also to incinerators, and that creates some big issues.

If you've got a lot of this stuff being ground up and burned, you could have some real nasty chemicals released into the environment. So that includes lead, which we know is not great. Right, So lead toxicity can affect every organ system in our bodies in some way. Lead can inhibit or mimic the actions of calcium and interact with proteins, so then it gets incorporated into us. And the nervous system is particularly vulnerable and lead exposure can

cause neurological damage, particularly in children. So it's definitely something to be concerned about. There's also not as much as there used to be, but there's some mercury in a lot of electronics. Since the move from lamp bulb type technology to LED technology, there's less mercury, but there's still some in a lot of electronics. Mercury is also toxic to the nervous system. It's also toxic to the digestive system and the immune system, and it can cause blindness,

muscle weakness, impaired movement, and lots of other neurological effects. Oh, that's not good because I take mercury to ward off vampireism. Well, I here's the good news. It's working. I guarantee you haven't suffered any of the effects of vampiresm since you started taking mercury um. There's also arsenic, which, uh, you know, not just a poisonous a carson carcinogen um. It's associated with lots of different types of cancer, and it's also

a neurotoxin. Uh, there's beryllium. An. Exposure to brillium is typically pretty minimal for most of us, but continued exposure it can lead to health problems ranging from skin diseases to acute beryllium disease, which it's a lot like pneumonia. It's a respiratory thing um and also lung cancer, although exposure to brillium leading to lung cancer is pretty rare, but it can happen. Then you have a whole class of chemicals that fall under the category rominadd flame retardants.

Two really bad things about this stuff, right, Some of it is incredibly hazardous to our health and can lead to memory and learning problems, thyroid disruption, reduced fertility, advanced puberty, and yet delayed mental and physical development, uh, particularly in p b d e S, a subclass of this stuff. The other problem some people claim that it doesn't really make stuff more flame retardants, so it's meant to do the specific thing, and it may not do it particularly

well and also comes with these health risks. Now, not all of the the subclasses under romanade flame retardants are equally hazardous, and some of them are much more um much less likely to leach out of their their you know, whatever material they're they're mixed in with. But it's still a concern. Now, there are other concerns about about what's contained in electronic ways that are not just based on poisons.

I mean, there's the example of rare earth materials. You know, these are things that are highly valuable and each individual device might not have very much in them, but when you consider how much of this stuff we get rid of, it's kind of a shame that we're just putting all of these rare elements to waste and throwing them in a landfill when they could be used for more technology or science. You can also find stuff like gold or sometimes silver, and some of these electronic devices. Um, yeah,

there's copper, there's steel. There's stuff that can be uh reused if you were able to take it out of the electronic device. So there is some value there. Um, it's uh the question that then comes down to how expensive is it to get the stuff out exactly versus how much is it works? And this is going to be one of the problems when we talk about how you recycle these things exactly. So let's before we get into that, though, we should probably look at some scope like,

how is this a big enough deal? Why are we even doing a podcast about it? Is it something that has been overhyped by certain media outlets? What what's the real scoop? Well, Jonathan, it seems like you may have had the same experience I had, which was seeing a bunch of different numbers thrown around. Well. Yeah, part of the problem is that if you start doing is just preliminary research on this topic, a lot of hits you're

going to receive. Ralph the Bat are coming from various advocacy groups that are arguing for more responsible stewardship of our electronics right and which I completely agree with. By the way, I completely agree with their their agenda. What makes me worry is that the statistics they cite may or may not be grounded in what I like to refer to as reality. Uh it may be, but it

may not be. So what you want to do is try and find as unbiased a source as possible to kind of get a feel for how big is this problem? Because uh, not that anyone necessarily is consciously trying to tweak the numbers one way or the other. But if you go with someone who doesn't have an outright agenda on the subject. Do you feel a little more comfortable

with the numbers that they cite. So one of the reports I read was actually it was something that Wired had had posted in an article, but they were citing a report from Markets and Markets, which is a research firm that in eleven, the world generated forty one and a half million tons of electronic waste between and going straight into landfills. So that's I mean, that's huge and and not good for all the reasons we just talked about with all the toxics, not to mention just a

waste of those materials we could reclaim and use elsewhere. Yeah, now you have another number here, which was one of the ones I cited when I was looking into this. It was the UH the United Nations University Estimate that put together a report UH that in they said the number was about forty two million tons. I think it was forty one point eight or forty one point something million metric tons, so just a little bit more than what the two thousand and eleven number was, which means

it stayed fairly consistent. UM. But they also calculated that the consumption for new electronics amounted to fifty eight million tons in twelve, meaning we're bringing on more and more.

And so when you start looking at that um that life cycle that you know, two years for forty four two years for a phone for percent of the people in the United States who are buying phones, or four or five years for computers, and you start thinking, well, our consumption levels are growing, therefore our waste numbers are going to grow within the next f years. Now, Jonathan, here's something maybe you could comment on from experience talking

about these trends in tech stuff. Not only are we incorporating more devices, but do you think devices are typically getting shorter lives. I want to say yes. It behooves a company to convince consumers to buy the newest thing, because that's how companies make money. Of Course, you don't want them having the thought that the last time they bought something from you, it didn't work for a long time, right, which I think is I think two years is that

sweet spot for a lot of phones. I think Apple hit on something where they had they got that even more rapid group of consumers, the super fans for Apple who are willing to pay the extra amount of money it would take to upgrade yearly as opposed to every two years. But that's rare, right. I think two years is the sweet spot for smartphones for a number of reasons, one of which is that that gives an of time

for advances in hardware and software. Two turn whatever was that you had from two years ago, uh, into being either less useful or maybe even completely obsolete. So, for example, you may find out that the phone you have, While you love that phone, it can't support any of the more recent upbring system updates and the one that it's on is no longer being supported. That's a problem, right, because any new app coming out may not work on your device anymore. You have an incentive to go an upgrade.

And part of this, I think is is driven by the market. I think part of it's driven by consumer behavior. Uh. I don't think anyone necessarily. I don't think there's like a cabal meeting behind the scenes at at cell phone or computer companies saying so, how frequently do you think we can make them buy a new phone? Like, I don't think that's happening, um, but I'm sure that it's

played apart. Right. It's it's a trend that I have seen and when we get into these new electronics stuff that is meant to work into like the automated households or the Internet of Things, you run into more of that risk because what happens if the company you go with ends up not being able to make it and suddenly like the stuff you have has limited functionality, it doesn't function with other stuff that is still being supported

in the market. So if I go and buy, you know, some home automation stuff from Company A, and Company A goes out of business and Company B is still in business and they do the same sort of stuff and can complete whatever project I had to automate my home, it may mean they have to buy all new things because Company B stuff isn't going to communicate with Company ACE stuff which I already have installed in my house, which means I gotta get rid of all that stuff

I had already bought, and that creates more e waste. These are the sort of things that play in. It's not just the lifespan of the electronics, it's the lifespan of the parent companies that make the stuff, right, So we have a lot of different forces at play that turn these electronics into trash. From the eyes of the person who buys it pretty quickly, like there's an amazing churn rate. And all of this obviously tells us that

this is something we need to pay attention to. How can we deal with our electronic waste in a responsible way? And one of the biggest challenges is making sure that countries that are part of the developing world don't suffer uh while the rest of us are figuring out how to manage this waste. Right, because we're seeing around the world where countries like in Africa, for example, are leap

frogging technologies. They don't they're not going with landline systems because to cover the continent in telephone cables would take a really long time. Their leapfrogging are already available, right, they're leap frogging directly to cell phones. So because they're doing that, they they're jumping ahead. Uh, they're jumping faster than they have the capacity to deal with the consequences, Like what do you do with e waste when you're

generating it? And if it's a country that doesn't have very strong health and safety regulations or waste management policies, then there's a real danger that that stuff could be disposed of in a way that poses a threat to

the environment and to the people who live there. And uh, we're seeing that happen a lot um And in fact, we're seeing also in the United Nations University study that there are a lot of countries that are dealing with us not just irresponsibly but illegally, including developed nations that are shipping stuff from the developed nations to developing nations. Essentially, the way it works is, I've got a whole bunch of e waste, right I run a recycling program in

the United States. It don't really this is a hypothetical situation. But I run a recycling program, and I have determined that the stuff I'm bringing in it actually costs me too much money to really recycle it and reclaim those materials, and I would be losing money on the on the proposition. So but if you could pay people a very low wage to get the materials out of it, you might

be able to make more money. Or if I could just sell it to a country and the country says we will pay you x amount per however much weight of electronics. You got those for free, or I got those for free by running this recycling program. Because people are sending me their stuff. I'm getting this free resource that I can then sell to some other outlet, and they might use a very um shady approach to reclaiming the materials inside those phones, which are ultimately harmful to

the people who live there. Now, this could actually amount to big money industry over time, especially you know, one of those research firms we mentioned earlier, Markets and Markets had a prediction about how much money would be going into the e waste industry in the coming years, five billion dollar industry by and when you think about this is dealing with garbage, right, dealing with stuff that people

don't want, five billion dollar industry. It's not making something, it's not producing something new, and most it's reclaiming stuff that's already inside existing products. So let's talk a little bit about the responsible ways to deal with electronic waste. Because I'm not suggesting to people, Hey, the stuff you've got, it's good enough. Stop. I'm not going to tell people that. But I am going to tell people look into ways to dispose of your electronics in a responsible manner so

that you have as little negative impact on others as possible. Okay, so first method, just pile up the electronics in your basement or garage and never look at it again. I can tell you that I based upon I just I just recently, as of like last night, did a big reord thing in my garage. Came across a bunch of boxes that had cell phones that probably dated from the maybe the early two thousand's, like the big brick ones,

the candy bar type. And I can tell you that, um, that only works for a while, essentially turns your home into a landfill, so you probably don't want to keep that up. But reusing is the ideal situation, right exactly. Yeah, if the electronic device is still in working order or it can be repaired easily, relatively easily, then donating that to a sir of us that takes in old electronics and then UH issues them to two people who need

them that can be really helpful. Like there's one here in the United States where you can donate it and it's a it'll go to someone in the military along with prepaid phone cards so that they can make phone calls back home while they're deployed around the world, which is a pretty noble thing, right. There's some that will end up UH delivering working cell phones to um two people in different parts of the world where there are cell services, but there's not a lot of actual phone

technology there yet. In other words, you're getting phones to people who need them but can't have access to them easily. That's ideal, right, Uh. And in large operations that that do this sort of stuff, typically it involves employing people to clean, assess, and repair electronics. And because of there's a there's a huge variety of stuff coming in, like all sorts of different phones and electronic gadgets that come

into these places. You can't really employ robots to do it because robots tend to be really good at very specific things, and then as soon as something outside of that falls into their hands, they can't do anything with it. So, for example, if you have a robot this program to unscrew the back of a Samsung phone, and then you give it an iPhone, it's gonna look at it and say, well, well, I don't I can't do anything with this. Why program

to feel pain? Right? Granted, if you were to do the same thing to a human they might say the same thing, but that's because phones are getting harder and harder to take a part more on that in just a second. But the idea being that not only are you giving someone access to electronics they might not otherwise have, and you're getting rid of the stuff you don't want anymore, you're also helping employ people because there these jobs require

human beings in them. So there's kind like a domino effect of wind wind going on here when you do it this way. Now, granted, ultimately that device is eventually going to break and have to be disposed of, but this extends its useful life well beyond what it would be just in your hands. So that's that's the ideal situation.

Now you could look at that as a form of electronics recycling, but more specifically, that's reusing because you're trying to keep the phone as intact as possible as a usable device, not just the phone, the device, whatever it is. But another form of recycling would be looking at it from a component's point of view, and this would be where you're reclaiming specific materials like that steel or copper

or aluminum. We we talked about it before. Now there's a problem with this, which is that over if you look at the entire uh spectrum of all the stuff we throw away, and you know those millions of tons of things that you throw away, that's just enormous amounts of valuable materials. But each individual device doesn't have very much in it, right, So then you have to come to that determination. Is it worth the trouble to get

the stuff out of this one phone? Or am I gonna be spending more money ultimately trying to get the stuff out? Then it's actually worth So you know, you do this return on investment calculation and you say, this one phone represents X number of sense of of money in U S terms, it's gonna cost why amount of sense to get it out of there? If why is equal to or greater than x, it makes no sense s E N S E to actually do it, right,

you would be less. If you're incredibly altruistic and you don't mind the fact that you are spending your money to deal with other people's garbage. Uh, then absolutely it would be something that uh that you would avoid doing. I mean, I can't imagine someone operating at that kind

of scale for very long. You couldn't afford to do it unless you were incredibly wealthy, and you're you just decide this is where my wealth is gonna go, which would be awesome if someone did that, but you know, in the world that we live in, it's not terribly likely. So or if you're dealing with solid gold iPhones, which does exist, Yeah, yeah, they do have them. So when you get one, if you were recycling, if you're a recycling center, you'd say, this is worth it, This is

absolutely worth reclaiming that material because there's no way. Yeah, um, I'm yeah, I'm absolutely certain. Like well, I mean, if you're the type to buy a gold iPhone, chances are the idea of being frugal has never entered your brain at that point, or at least not recently. Uh So. One other thing that it that these recyclers take into account is how easy is it to disassemble the various

types of electronics. Now, this is kind of a frustrating thing about the conflict between the state of the industry and the concerns of recycling. So ideally, what you'd want is a device that can very easily and very quickly be taken apart so you can get the valuable parts out of it and recycle them. Uh that is not the way most devices are made today, especially for example, if you look at iPhones today, iPhones are not made

to be easily disassembled and dealt with. If you've ever had the problem where you, for example, you want to take the battery out of your iPhone or something, you you just not You're not supposed to do that by yourself. You're supposed to take it to a very licensed professional, take it to the genius bar or whatever it requires a genius to deal with that, have them deal with it for you. Now, of course you can look up videos on how you you can do this at home,

but they they're trying to scourage that clearly. Well there and there are quite a few websites that are specifically dedicated to taking apart electronics, and they document the whole process, and they even will grade how hard was it to

take this thing apart? You know? And and it would And it's all in the the it's all framed in the way of how do you do repairs to this sort of stuff or if you need to replace a component or something along those lines, Um, how realistic is that based upon the difficulty of taking apart this device.

Recyclers do a similar thing, and Apple is a great, great example of a company that makes it very very hard to recycle responsibly because they use proprietary screws in their products, so you don't you can't just use a regular screwdriver to remove the screws. They use a lot of glue to hold the components in place in their and their mobile electronics, which is great for keeping a nice solid, thin form factor, but not great if you

need to remove those components in order to reclaim the materials. Um, it's just it's and the harder it is, obviously, the more it costs to recycle that thing, because the more effort is required, and as that cost goes up, the return on investment goes down. And if it goes up too high, then there's the from the recycler's perspective, there's no point in even working with the thing because it's

going to just be a money losing proposition. Um. And products are getting lighter as well, which is making it more difficult for recyclers to deal with because that lighter as also tends to mean that uh, they're being sealed with again a lot more glue rather than screws. Yeah, and that makes it much more difficult to deal with.

And uh, meanwhile, you've got these other countries that have lower standards of waste management and UM and health and safety, it may end up being more uh, financially advisable to ship off this stuff that's hard for us to get into two countries where they still can make a profit from that because they're paying the employees next to nothing um and they have these very lax policies so they don't they don't have to go through the same regulations

that you would see in another place like the United States or in various countries in Europe, that kind of thing. Uh. And that's where it gets really ugly, because they will take apart those electronic devices. They will use chemicals, very hazardous chemicals to leach away stuff so that they can get at the stuff they want. And all of this has an impact on the environment and the people there. Yeah, what about all the lead and the beryllium and all

the other stuff we talked about earlier. Yeah, there's a real concern that they're like there are entire city is in China where there's a real concern that cancer rates are going to skyrocket because they are essentially bordering the recycling facilities where tons of this stuff arrive every year. So it's a real problem, right, It's a real issue. It's not something that is just a hypothetical or being

um kind of inflated by the media. Um. And so it really falls on us to be responsible with our electronics, making sure that the any any programs we donate stuff too that we go to for recycling, do some research on them to make sure that they are being responsible and accountable for that stuff and not just shipping it overseas and making it someone else's problem. So, apart from reusing and responsible recycling, what are some of the other weirder solutions people have come up with for how to

deal with the E waste problem? All right, let's say you don't want your phone anymore, right, you've dropped it

in the toilet. Well, at that point, you don't have to worry about it, because I'm talking about dissolvable electronics what And typically the way it would work is that you would have this electronic device that would work on a system that's not exactly the same as using microprocessors the way our kernel electronics do UM, and you you then expose it to something like water, and it would dissolve away and you would no longer have a thing anymore.

It would actually become non hazardous, non toxic chemicals that just are safe to wash away. There are, yeah, there are people working on this. Um. So back in two thousand thirteen national meeting of the American Chemistry Society, scientists were talking about the possibility of dissolvable electronics. They were specifically talking about advances that had been made so far with the goal of eating electronic devices that would ultimately dissolve.

And this was largely for the medical field. So if you wanted to create a medical device that had a very specific purpose and you surgically implant it into a patient, if it were able to dissolve after its useful lifespan had passed, that would be great because you wouldn't have to have a follow up surgery to remove the device, right, it would just dissolve and be absorbed and that's it. Sure, And assuming it's really non toxic and non hazardous, that's great.

You know, obviously that would be ideal, but the approach could also be used for non medical electronics and not necessarily be completely totally awesome for you. So um according to Dr John Rodgers, who led the research in this area, he said that one of the things that would allow companies to do would be to design products that have essentially an expiration date, so after two years it could dissolve, meaning you would be forced to buy a new phone

because your old one literally turned into goog. Well, I'd assume that if they did something like that, it wouldn't come as a surprise to the consumer the way their technological obsolescence might come as a surprise. So it could encourage companies to either to to sort of, I don't know, be straightforward about their planned obsolescence. Yeah. Maybe, Uh, I think it would be kind of funny to get a message on your phone warning in two months, your phone

will turn into Google. Please back up everything you're gonna need to get a new phone. Buster. We've already got it lined up. You just have to click this link on your phone and you'll be able to get a new one. And um Now, there's no telling when, if ever, this technology would enter into the consumer market in that way.

I am certain there are a lot of companies out there that salivate over the thought, or company executives, I guess I should say, who salivate over the thought of a technology that requires customers to buy replacements on a regular basis because it guarantees business for a nice long time. But it may be that we never see this, at

least not in the consumer realm. I'm sure that there are a lot of people working very hard to make it a reality for medicine, but we may never see it incorporated into phones or computers or televisions or anything

like that. Um And there's some other solutions. Obviously, Electronics manufacturers could consult with recycling companies before they start designing new products to make sure that the stuff they design is more easily uh taken apart, and the stuff inside could be reclaimed more easily, so that it there's a higher incentive to do the recycling in a responsible manner in a country where you do have those strict policies in place, so you remove the incentive to ship it

off to another country and thus potentially cause some other people terrible hardship. Um And we're actually seeing some companies do this. There's some computer companies that have received awards for changing their computer design so that they're more easily taken apart. I believe del has won some awards in

that in that realm. So yeah, so some companies are really taking it to heart, and it's a it's an approach that's it's tied into the green electronics movement, where you're not just trying to use less hazardous materials, but you're also trying to design the products in such a way that they're more easily handled at the end of their lifespan. So it's a little it's a little forward thinking in that sense, like, how can we make this a product that is easy to deal with after it's

useful life has has passed? Um? And then of course we could just try to not buy stuff all the time away all the time. Yeah, to keep the stuff we buy longer. Um, It's it require a pretty big cultural change, which is gonna become increasingly more difficult as we see more and more electronic devices hit the market. I mean, honestly, Joe, do you think you would really be able to resist the urge of buying one of those uh special cat callers that can interpret it cat's

me out and turn it into an English phrase? Do you really think you can resist that? I don't know how much beryllium is in it, at least one cat's worth, I would think, But but I mean you see, you see stuff popping up all the time where I mean maybe not that. See I don't own a cat, so I don't have any desire to buy one of those. But you may see more and more stuff up all the time that that appeals to you. And that's you know, you gotta weigh the your desires versus your your feeling

of responsibility. Um, maybe you don't feel responsible and it's just time to go out and buy some new stuff. But there's another way we can kind of impact this whole this whole equation is just reduce our consumption or at least be more mindful of it, so that when we are doing these things, maybe we pick devices or computers or televisions or whatever that we know have a good reputation in this world for the recycling side of things. Um, And if we do that then things will be in

general better. But also just you know, research those recycling services that are in your area, see what's available. A lot of them will offer things like gift cards or a cash return on old devices. It may be a very small amount of what you paid for it. In fact, it is almost guaranteed to be. But but it's something as opposed to just throwing it in the garbage and then you don't get anything right. It just goes away. This way it goes away, and get something back right.

So do some research on that. Uh, and and try and do your part in not cluttering up landfills with toxic materials that could potentially hurt people for generations. Uh. I think that's just a general that's a good rule of thumb, you know. I mean, I don't want to be a radical or anything. Joe's just judging me across the table. There's nothing radical about you, that's true. Everything radical about me die, Everything radical about me died in y I'm growdy to the max. All right. So that

wraps up this discussion about e waste. We're get We've got a whole bunch of really cool topics in mind for future episodes. But if you guys have anything specific you would like us to cover. Maybe there's something you've always wondered, how will that be? What? What will it be like in the future, Send us an email and ask us, and we will be glad to research it and get back to you with a full blown episode

about it. But in order to get that word to us, you need to send us an email that addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. Over at Twitter where f W Thinking. If you search fw Thinking and Facebook, our profile will pop right up. You can leave us a message and we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, I'll visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,