The Story of Electronics Notes
- It is a key strategy for the company to make our electronics
- Today's electronics are hard to upgrade, easy to break, and impractical to repair
- Moore's Law- Gordon Moore said that electronics designers could double processor speed every 18 months
- Causing a global toxic emergency
- Workers make the products with toxic chemicals like PVC and flame retardants
- IBM studies show that workers making computer chips had 40% more miscarriages
- Disposal is what we think of as the end of an electronics life
- Some are slowly releasing toxic chemicals as we use them
- Old televisions have about 5 pounds of lead in them
- E-waste goes to landfills or is shipped across the world for someone else to recycle it
- Each year we make 25 million tons of e-waste
- Problems of electronics are created by the companies ignore environmental costs
- Instead of paying to make facilities safe, workers are with their health
- Instead of paying to redesign using fewer toxics, villagers pay losing their clean drinking water
- Take back laws are popping up all over Europe and Asia
- Choices in store are limited to choices by designers and policy makers
- Products get dumped, burned, or recycled
- Take back laws need to be protected and strengthened
- NEED to save our environment
- We think our electronics are being recycled but few of it is
- Developing countries buy our electronics and take the valuable part out of it and burn the rest
- Children in these countries are doing this work
- Exposed to many bad chemicals, bad!