Electronic waste is an enormous issue in this country. Check out the Wikipedia article….SCARY. Quoting the article “An estimated 50 million tons of E–waste is produced each year. The USA discards 30 million computers each year and 100 million phones are disposed of .” At the end of last week I stopped by our local recycling center to drop off our newspapers and tins. Normally there is a dumpster (or skip in the UK) where electronics are dumped in. I’d never looked in to see what was there. In the corner of the site was an interesting collection of waste. See the shot below. I assumed it was a couple of weeks worth of waste and chatted with the host of the site. I was shocked to hear that it was less than 72 hours of waste. I was there on Thursday morning at 7am and the dumpster had been picked up on Monday around lunch time. Look at how many large screen TVs there are. There are 11 ADDITIONAL sites like this in Wake County. The population is 900,000. Eleven sites like this, this level of waste in <72 hours. Shocking. In the old days we’d FIX TVs…now we throw them away. It doesn’t seem to matter how much we invested in them! The big screen TVs were likely $1000 or more when purchased. The stack of computers, printers, microwaves and so in is stacked behind the big screen TVs too. Makes me proud to be a consumer….NOT!
<72 hours of collecting electronic trash in Wake County
