Sustainability History Project

One of the many kinds of sustainability enigmas involve balancing the hidden social and environmental costs to produce and dispose of information technologies with the astounding array of diverse positive benefits of these technologies.

Computers, cell phones, and other electronic tools and toys continue to become increasingly important to more people, and in more ways. Though the lives of millions of us center on computers and electronic equipment, most of us tend not to think too deeply about how these devices are created, or how they are disposed of. Here in the Portland area, there seem to be some solutions to the disposal of superseded gadgets. The Metro Regional Government provides e-waste recycling, and Free Geek refurbishes old equipment and provides them at low- or no-cost to people and organizations in need.

How do we compare and balance the obvious importance of these technologies with the very real social, economic, and environmental issues posed by the creation and disposal of this stuff?

The Lamentable Birth of Electronic Gadgets

Steve Scher featured Mike Daisey‘s work on a recent episode of his Weekday program on KUOW, Agony And Ecstasy: Solo Performer Mike Daisey Examines Steve Jobs. Daisey is an admitted technophile, but his in-depth investigation into one of Apple’s production sites in China has helped him view the computer and electronics industries in a much more complex way.

Daisey uncovered appalling labor conditions at the Special Economic Zone in Shenzhen, where the Chinese government had invited technology corporations to build the physical infrastructure and set the personnel and safety standards. With this freedom, corporations, including Apple and Nokia, established working conditions that have not been standard practices in the U.S. since the early twentieth century. In essence, Daisey concludes, technology corporations have fled the U.S. to produce their goods where health, safety, and environmental standards are extremely lax, at best, and in any event not enforced by any external authority.

Jane Horwitz writes of Daisey’s work in her Washington Post article:

Daisey traveled last spring to Shenzhen, China, where Apple’s and other companies’ hardware is made by subcontractors such as Foxconn. He posed as a businessman to gain access to many factories and used an interpreter to talk with workers.

Daisey was appalled by the working conditions — factory floors packed with 25,000 and more workers, some children, doing 12- and 18-hour shifts or longer, living in cramped quarters and shadowed by factory security people.

“I expected it to be bad. I expected it to be harsh. I was not actually prepared for how dehumanizing it was. I wasn’t actually prepared for the scale of it. . . . That was what shocked me,” Daisey says.

In his interview with Steve Scher, Daisey concluded that technology consumers don’t generally know about the deplorable circumstances that went in to creating their MacBook or iPhone, but that this position of ignorance is no longer defensible. As important and enjoyable as technical gadgets are, these benefits do not accrue without some significant costs.

The Grotesque Death of Electronic Gadgets

What happens to some e-waste after it has been deposited at a recycling center? PBS’ FrontLine program produced a segment titled “Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground“:

On the outskirts of Ghana’s biggest city sits a smoldering wasteland, a slum carved into the banks of the Korle Lagoon, one of the most polluted bodies of water on earth. The locals call it Sodom and Gomorrah.

[The PBS journalists’] guide is a 13-year-old boy named Alex. He shows them his home, a small room in a mass of shanty dwellings, and offers to take them across a dead river to a notorious area called Agbogbloshie.

Agbogbloshie has become one of the world’s digital dumping grounds, where the West’s electronic waste, or e-waste, piles up — hundreds of millions of tons of it each year.

Some of the boys burn old foam on top of computers to melt away the plastic, leaving behind scraps of copper and iron they can collect to sell. The younger boys use magnets from old speakers to gather up the smaller pieces left behind at the burn site.

When containers of old computers first began arriving in West Africa a few years ago, Ghanaians welcomed what they thought were donations to help bridge the digital divide. But soon exporters learned to exploit the loopholes by labeling junk computers “donations,” leaving men like Godson to sort it out.

“Some are from Germany and the U.K., and also from America,” he says, when asked where the equipment has come from. He sorts through them looking for working electronics that can be sold. He says that maybe 50 percent of the shipment is junk and the rest he will be able to salvage in some way.

These examples illustrate some of the complexities involved in considering how the ideals of sustainability are or are not put in to practice.

–