Annie Leonard - The Story of Electronics

The focus of this video is designing for the dump. The main issue within the electronics industry is that companies and designers are creating products that have extremely short lifecycles and will always go to waste quickly so that you are encouraged to buy new products. Like most things, electronics always start out in mines as raw material. They are then sent all around the world in order to create parts and components. All throughout these stages, the levels of pollution are extremely high and there is an immense amount of waste produced that just goes to landfill. For example, when IBM corporation workers, making computer chips and components, were tested for health and well-being and results showed that all of these workers were about 40% more unhealthy than the average person.

The idea of toxins in and toxins out is an extremely large focus of this video. The issue is that all of these large electronics manufacturers are using very harsh and harmful chemicals and materials in their products, and instead of spending the extra money to create cleaner & healthier working environments or develop methods of creating components without using these harmful chemicals and materials, the companies are simply using the health of the workers and the general public. This is clearly a very unethical practice but because the companies have so much power and essentially make all the rules. 

When old products are disposed of, if they are not turned into landfill locally, they are being shipped overseas where the valuable materials are extracted and then the rest is just burned off (destroying the environment in that country). There are 25 million tons of e-waste each year which gets dumped, burned or recycled (not green recycling). The idea that Annie Leonard is pressing upon these companies is that the laws/rules should be changed so that the companies who create the mess should be responsible for cleaning it up. This seems like a very fair idea, but realistically it will take a very large force to convince these corporations.