Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job and Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And we are taking a little break during the holiday season, um so that we can enjoy some time with our our loved ones. But I'm sure many of you out there will be receiving some new tech gear this holiday season, so I thought it would be a great idea to revisit this episode, which originally published on October. It is called E Waste and What to Do with It. So you might find yourself needing to get rid of some older tech. Right, you got new stuff, now you gotta figure out what to do with the old stuff. However, technology can have some pretty nasty components in its stuff that has dangerous materials. So we're gonna learn in this episode the challenges associated with disposing of technology in a safe and responsible manner. Enjoy. So today we're going to talk about e waste or electronic waste, because it's a real problem for many reasons. One of the big ones is that we live in an era in which companies are really pushing out new products at a rapid pace and doing their best to convince you that you need to buy or upgrade or whatever on a frequent basis. That's how these companies make their money, so it comes as no surprise that they would do this. It's the nature of business, and that means a couple of things have to happen to make that business plan actually work. And one of those things is that ideally you make a product that's good, but not so good that your customers will never need another one after they buy the first one. It's the everlasting gobstopper problem of Willy Wonka. If you actually made a candy that never got any smaller and never lost its flavor, people would only buy one and would never need a second one. And where do you go then? So as another example in the tech world, let's let's imagine that you have created a really cool smart watch and it actually has features that people find really compelling. You made the first smart watch that a a larger audience thinks that actually makes a lot of sense. So your market is going to be everybody who might want and who can afford a smart watch. Now, obviously that doesn't include every single human being. Some people are not going to be able to afford it. Some people are not going to be interested in it. But you're trying to target everyone who would want one and who could afford one. So now, let's say you are incredibly successful in an unprecedented move. Somehow you have convinced every single person that's in that target group to buy one of your smart watches. Congratulations, it's a big hit. Only what do you do next. Because you're operating a company, you are not going to magically sell more of those smart watches beyond your target group, because the rest of humanity either doesn't want one, or they can't afford one, or both, So soon you go out of business because you have nothing else to sell. Or let's say instead, you want to make a smart watch, and you've come up with a whole list of really cool, compelling features, but you choose to only implement a selection of those features in your first smart watch. You hold back a few more. Maybe you're holding them back because they're not quite ready. Maybe you're holding back because the technology of the smart watch isn't quite at the point where it can support those features. Or maybe you're doing it just so that you can save some stuff for the next generation of smart watches. You also make your smart watches out of good but not great materials, including stuff like batteries. That way, the smart watches begin to wear out after a set amount of time, maybe a couple of years. And your goal is that you want to win a loyal base of customers, and then you want to convince that same group to turn around and buy the next generation of your hardware, and then do it again and again. That's essentially how a lot of the smartphone industry works, at least for brands like the iPhone. One of the reasons Apple is so successful is as a company, it has managed to convince customers to purchase updated versions of its hardware time and time again, sometimes on an accelerated time scale. It might not happen with every generation for every product, but it happens enough to keep the company really profitable. I'm sure you know people. If you are not one of these people, you probably know somebody who upgrades their iPhone every year, so they get the latest version of the I own every single twelve months. That's the kind of of era we are in. And while that doesn't cover every single Apple customer, it covers a lot of them, and there are a lot more customers who every two years or three years will do this upgrade. And while I could and probably one day will do a full episode about the concept of planned obsolescence. That's where a company makes a product that essentially has an expiration date that the company has made something with the plan of having that thing become obsolete within a certain amount of time. Today, we're gonna look at the other side of that problem. What do we do with the obsolete technology when something better comes along, Whether the technology still works or maybe it's beyond repair, what do we do with it when we're done with it. That's why we're going to talk about electronic waste. And it's a huge category because it includes not just the technology that no longer works or technology that's become obsolete. It includes all tech that is no longer wanted by its original owner. So you might have a phone that's several years old but still works perfectly well, but you'll be confronted with all sorts of advertising and messaging that what you should do is ditch that old phone for something new and shiny with a lot more features. And your old phone, even if it is still in perfect working order becomes e waste. The moment you decide you want a new phone, what happens next is up to you. You have some options. You might choose to recycle your phone, in which case I recommend first you wipe everything off your device, whether it's a phone, a computer, anything that could record your information. You need to wipe that device clean, return it to factory settings, make sure that your personal data is no longer associated with that machine before you turn it in. And I also recommend you do some research into the various services that offer to either cycle components for you, or they're going to donate the device to someone in need, so it's going to be reused rather than recycled. Make sure that that service is reputable. There are some companies that can cause harm through the recycling process or through the smoke screen of donating it to people in need. More on that in just a second. Or maybe you don't want to recycle or reuse, or maybe you just don't have the the services that are readily available, or you're not interested. You just shrug your shoulders and you toss your phone in the trash. That is not a great plan, and it can be against the law depending upon where you live. Many electronics have components in them that are not environmentally friendly, and they don't exactly biodegrade. Electronics might have toxic materials in them. In fact, most of them do, stuff like lead, or arsenic or mercury. Exposure to the elements would cause those chemicals possibly to leach into this rounding environment and it ain't fantastic. So here's some examples of some of the stuff. So lead toxicity can affect every oregan system in our bodies. Lead can inhibit or mimic the actions of calcium and interact with proteins. The nervous system is particularly vulnerable, and lead exposure can cause neurological damage, particularly in children. Mercury is also nasty stuff. It's toxic to the nervous system. It's also toxic to the digestive system and the immune system. It can cause blindness, muscle weakness, impaired movement, and lots of other neurological effects. Arsenic isn't a lot of electronics. That's a carcinogen that's associated with many different types of cancer, and it's also a neurotoxin. You've probably heard of arsenic and old lace yeah, popular poison among UH mystery novelists. It's popular because it's deadly stuff. Beryllium is another dangerous element that's in a lot of electronics. Exposure to brillium is typically pretty minimal for most of us, but you could have continued exposure due to maybe living near, for example, a recycling center that's not doing a good job at containing this stuff. That can lead to health problems ranging from skin diseases to what is called acute beryllium disease, which the symptoms are very similar to pneumonia. It can even lead, although this is pretty rare, to lung cancer. Then there's rominated flame retardants. This is actually a class of synthetic chemicals that are designed to make stuff less flammable. Frequently it tends to be incorporated directly into plastics. Some of them, like p B d e S, have been linked to numerous health risks, including memory and learning problems. Also, thyroid disruption, reduced fertility, advanced puberty, and delayed mental and physical development. So we're talking serious consequences from some of the stuff that's in our electronics. There's also the possibility that if you throw your tech away instead of it going to say a landfill, which is already pretty bad. They might go to an incinerator, which could be even worse because then it gets thrown into a furnace and subjected to high heat, it could produce other pollutants and those could all be released directly into the environment, causing environmental harm and health hazards to the population nearby. Or maybe you take a different choice. Maybe you don't send it off to be reused recycled, maybe you don't throw it away. Maybe it just takes up space in your home. But that's also not great. Sometimes it feels like it's the least bad situation, but you can find ways of have it making sure your device is reused recycled responsibly. I'll talk more about that in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In a Gallop survey found that forty scent of Americans would upgrade their mobile handsets as soon as they were able to according to their phone plans. So in America, until fairly recently, it was really common that these mobile providers would subsidize handset costs through the actual phone service plans themselves, and so the cost of the handsets to the customer were much lower on an upfront basis than you would find in other places in the world. So instead of having to spend several hundred dollars to buy a handset, it might be very cheap, but that cost would be incorporated into your phone plan. It would just be spread out over the course of your contract, which in America would typically last about two years. So every two years your contract would come up and you would become eligible to upgrade your phone for a new contract. And everybody seemed to benefit from this. You got a new phone, the phone company had you for another two years. Ultimately, over the course of those two years, you're probably paying more for that handset than you would if you had bought it all up front. It's just those payments have been spread out over twenty four months. And it seemed like it was a fairly nice proposition, except for the fact that that meant that people were generating a lot of electronic waste. All these old handsets were starting to accumulate, and that's just mobile handsets. Generally speaking. Computer experts say that the average PCs lifespan is somewhere between three and five years. That typically sometime around three to five years, averaging out around four years. People need to upgrade their computers because they're just out of date. They're not running the latest software. Of the parts start to wear out, you know, batteries start to go bad. So then you have to do the same thing with your computer. What do you do with that? That's a larger piece of equipment than a mobile handset. Obviously, TVs tend to stick around a little bit longer, despite the best efforts of various companies out there. Because every time I go to c e S that's the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas every year, it seems like the big push is to come up with a new feature that's going to convince someone who bought a new television last year to do it all over again. But generally speaking, people don't do that because it's pretty expensive. People tend to stick with the same television for un average around seven years before upgrading. I think I'm behind the average there. I don't even I stick with my televisions forever, it seems, but you don't see that happen as frequently. But that still is an issue if you do upgrade. Let's say that Thanksgiving roles around in the States. That's typically when you start seeing these big uh discounts on televisions that came out the year before and stores want to clear out those inventories to make way for new TVs they're coming in in the new year. Uh. You can get these crazy deals on what looks to be like a great bar in for a television, but that means you have to do something with your old TV. Again electronic waste, and there are larger appliances that we tend to stick with until we need to replace them. Right Like, not a lot of people sit there and say I want a new washer and dryer unless their old washer and dryer is either become unreliable or has just plane broken. But eventually we do have to replace these things. So pretty much anything that has circuitry or electrical components fits into the category of e waste, from lamps to washing machines or smart watches to large screen televisions, and electronic waste is one of the fastest growing types of waste in the world. As we see technology adoption increase in new markets like Africa, we're seeing those numbers climb rapidly. Now developed countries do tend to produce a lot more E waste. As a rule, China is known for producing most of it, and if you're looking at it from a percentage point and looking at each nation, China leads the way, but America is not super far behind. When it comes the highest amount of E waste generated per inhabitant. You gotta look over toward Australia, Polynesia, Micronesia and that area. They generate the most E waste per inhabitant, but there are very few people they're compared to other parts of the world, so it doesn't amount to as much in a grand scheme of things. The cost of consumer electronics also continues to drop. That makes electronics more accessible to a wider group of people, and I think that's a good thing. I think have more people having access to technology is great. In general. It's very important accessibility, making sure that we start to whittle away at that gap between the halves and the have nots. However, when you pair this with the trend of pushing people to adopt and then abandoned technology rapidly in favor of the next new thing, it really exacerbates the problem of E waste. In the United Nations released a report on e waste that looked into trends and challenges, and that report found that by the lobal production of E waste had hit forty four point seven million metric tons of junct tech. That's the equivalent of four thousand, five hundred Eiffel towers. That means, on average, each inhabitant produced six point one ks or nearly thirteen and a half pounds of electronic waste. In twenty sixteen, it was more like five point eight kilograms or twelve point eight pounds, so the trend was on the rise. Not only are we generating more, we're generating more per person. Only of all of that e waste was properly documented as being recycled or reused under was considered to be the the appropriate guidelines. So, according to the United Nations, of the forty four point seven million metric tons of e waste produced by twenty sixteen, one point seven million tons of it got thrown into residual waste in higher income countries, which pretty much means they either ended up in landfills or in incinerators. Only eight point nine million tons was documented as collected and recycled, so it's possible the more waste is being recycled than we know about, but it's undocumented and unverified, which ain't great, and since the trend seems to be on the rise, this is really bad news. Now again, according to the u N report, by twenty twenty one will see E waste hit fifty two point two million metric tons. I'm citing the United Nations a lot, but I should also point out that it's very, very difficult to get an accurate representation of exactly how big this problem is because a lot of countries do not collect or publish statistics about electronic waste, and in some cases you may not be entirely certain that the findings that are being reported are accurate. So some of the numbers that the UN relies upon come from estimates as a result of doing some investigation and then extrapolating those results to get a bigger picture of view of what might be going on. And there are a lot of advocacy groups out there that really want to tackle E waste, and that is a good thing. I don't disagree with their motivation. However, I will say that sometimes some of these groups tend to present numbers that I personally cannot track down to a verifiable source, that is less good. I definitely agree we need to acknowledge and tackle the e waste problem in a responsible way. However, presenting information as fact without any evidence to back it up is a really good way to allow people who oppose your philosophy a means of criticizing your methods. So, in other words, you're just opening up the door for someone to tear down your argument, because if they can say this number you're citing as fact has no evidence to back it up, then it's like they're saying, well, you're arguing that something is a problem, but you can't even prove to me that the problem exists. That's not great. Many developed nations do have various programs in place to deal with electronic waste, things that you are supposed to do if you are trying to get rid of old electronics. However, these various programs aren't always followed properly, and in fact, some practices that are commonplace in these countries are technically illegal. However, they are rarely enforced, so you might see people throw stuff out in the garbage when they're supposed to follow a very different protocol, but because there's not really any way of policing that, and even if there were, there's not a high likelihood of it being prosecuted. There's no teeth to any legislation. People have to do it because they want to be responsible, not because they're worried about being punished otherwise. So appealing to people's responsibility, to their to their desire to be a good person might be more helpful. Just because it's not very practical in most cases to come up with pollution police developing nation have it fairly rough. Uh. These are the countries that did not benefit from gradually developing this technology and building out an infrastructure to support it. Instead, they leap frogged into the modern era of electronics without having done that, and so they aren't able to deal with the consequences as readily as the rest of the world, which has kind of grown into this. So I'm talking about places like lots of countries in Africa which have thankfully gotten access to things like cell towers, cell phones, a lot of cellular based technologies, but they did this by leap frogging other developments, and they don't have the systems in place to handle e waste. And it's also true and unfortunate that the people who are at least able to afford the problems that come along with electronic waste are the same ones who have to deal with it. In many cases, there's also an issue with developing countries accepting e waste for recycling purposes. Essentially, you've got UH places that will either accept or they will actually go out and buy electronic waste from other countries, which is not necessarily a bad thing on the surface. Recycling can be an industry unto itself, and it can provide a valuable service while recapturing some of the raw materials that were used to make electronics. The u N actually reported that those raw materials were worth about fifty five billion euro in UH in twenty sixteen. The euro averaged out to be about one point one dollars per euro, so that would be that the raw materials were worth around sixty billion dollars. So it would definitely be better too to reclaim some of that value to leverage it rather than just throw it out if you can do that. UH and I talked about some of the harmful materials that are in electronics, but they can also contain some really valuable stuff In it like goal to copper alumium and steal. But the bad part comes into play with the practices and processes for recycling electronics. If there are a few protections in place and a recycling center is not following careful protocols, the process of recycling can be very harmful to the environment as well as really the people who are working at that facility and for the surrounding population as a as a possibility. A lot of these places, the reason why they are an attractive place to send recycling for the rest of the world is that it's inexpensive to do it um And part of the reason for that is because in a lot of these countries the cost of labor is low, meaning they're not paying people very much. And uh that becomes a delicate balance too, because if the amount you're spending to recycle is larger than the amount you're getting back, you're in a losing proposition. So you can't continue to operate that way. But in order for you to do this in an efficient way, you have to find out, you know, what's a what's a low cost method of recycling this stuff? And it tends to be sending it to very poor nations that very low wages and often do not treat their employees very well. There's a terrible standard of living, and the measures that are supposed to be there in order to ensure people's safety may not be there at all, so it's very worrisome. Typically, the way a recycling center would process electronic waste would follow a pattern. So first it would have to get this electronic waste, which is a non trivial problem. Transporting materials requires energy, um it has an economic impact. So if it takes a lot of energy, if it takes a lot of money to get the electronic waste to the recycling center, you could be operating in a loss, which means it's a nonstarter once you get it. The next step could be an assessment of each piece of electronic waste, because some of these devices could be in good working order. Then if it's operable, or if you can do repairs on it and make it operable, you might want to resell that device for a profit and keep it in use. And that's one of the best options out there, honestly, because it increases the utility of a device beyond its initial lifespan with its original owner, and you don't have to go through the rest of this process. People can still get use out of it. It removes the necessity to make a new one of those, so it is reusing is one of the best options. In fact, reusing in general, when you're looking at reusing versus recycling, tends to be one of the best options out there. However, it can be tricky to do because sometimes it's not the easiest thing to repair some of these gadgets. More in that in just a second. But if you can do it, that tends to be step one. Sort out all the stuff that could actually be reclaimed, reused, resold. Next, assuming we're going to then reclaim the stuff inside the electronics that you cannot sell again. Maybe they're irreparably broken, maybe they're obsolete. Maybe there's no demand for those electronics, so they might work, but you're never going to sell them anyway, but just because no one wants them. Then you want to disassemble the device to get at the various components inside of it, especially the components that were really interested in, the ones that have materials like gold or copper on them. But that's not always easy to do, and this is also why it's very difficult to repair some types of electronics. More and more electronic devices are being locked away in their form factors. Like in the old days, good old days, children sit down, used to be able to take electronics apart and mess with them. So you hear a lot of stories about how young engineers when they were kids would take apart very gadgets in order to learn how they worked, and then would put them back together again and they would work. Still these days, it's a lot harder to do that because a lot of electronics are not designed to be taken apart. The industry as a whole has moved to a model that's difficult to do that. Apple is notorious for this. You get a new iPhone that is not meant to be taken apart. You are not meant to take the battery out of that. It is meant to be a single, unified device for its useful life. The company this way can keep a really tight control on how its technology is used. They have a lot of control over it as a platform. But this comes at a price. Manufacturers tend to use a lot of glue these days. That makes it really tricky to take the stuff apart, and it just makes it hard not just to do repairs, but to get at the various components in order to do some recycling. Now, if the device has parts that are particularly valuable, those might be set aside for resale value. Now this is particularly true for like older television and things like that. You might find that there's some working components in there that you can take apart or take out of the device and then sell those as replacement parts or repair parts, and then just recycled the rest of the stuff. Now, once you've disassembled the tech and you've removed anything that can easily be resold, then you would put it through a shredder to grind the components down into smaller pieces. Typically, after that point you would have some human employees go through this shredded material and remove anything that might be overtly hazardous, like pieces of battery, and then everything that's left over after you remove the hazardous stuff gets shredded again into even smaller pieces. Then you need to separate out those pieces into different stuff. One way you might do this is using a really big magnet and pass it over the shredded material. Anything that's uh this ferrist is going to be attracted to the magnet and we'll get pulled up by it, and you can then separate that out. Uh. You might otherwise need to use various methodologies to sort the particles into different densities which will represent different materials, and thus you get different piles of stuff. Um, there's a lot of things like centrifuges or platforms that shake a lot to help sort the stuff out, and you do this over and over again until you've got your various piles and stuff that has like precious metals might end up being uh exposed to an acid bath to burn away anything that isn't that metal, and then the pieces of metal can be gathered together and then eventually smelted into ingots. Glass and plastics can be separated for reprocessing. And then you have done everything you could to reclaim as much as you could from those devices. And if you've done it carefully and responsibly, you've done it without releasing toxic fumes or toxic materials into the environment or harming your employees. That's easier said than done. It is a challenging thing. It is possible you can do recycling responsibly, but it requires a lot of careful work and governance. I have more to say about electronic waste, but before I get to it, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So on October eighteen, which was just a few days before I jumped into the studio to record this episode, the world had its very first International E Waste Day. The goal there was not to generate more electronic waste, but rather to raise awareness of proper recycling and reuse programs for electronics, raising awareness over the illegal selling of e waste two countries that are buying it for processing and also for data mining. That's something that you should keep in mind that some of these companies that are offering to take electronics off your hands might actually be going through them very carefully to see if there's any data they can they can get from it, any personal data, any like logins, that kind of stuff. This actually does happen, and it happens on a pretty big basis, And because these companies will often send all this electronic waste to some other country that's outside the jurisdiction of whatever country you live in. I'm talking about the United States in particular because that's where I live, but it happens all over the world. That's a dangerous thing, and then they'll sell that data to interested buyers UM often wholesale. They'll just sell huge amounts of data at a time. That's one way of doing it. So it's very important to look at various UH resources online in order to get an idea of the reputation of the various services that are available out there for you to use for recycling or reusing. UM recycling can be economically difficult to support unless you're talking about markets that have those very low costs of labor, like I said before, the low salaries with no benefits, bad working conditions, that kind of thing. So it is a very tricky subject without it being more profitable than the only people who are willing to do it are going to be the ones who aren't having to spend so much money to go through the process in the first place. So finding a reputable service that will recycle electronics in a way that is responsible, it's not exploitative of its workforce, it's not exposing the environment needlessly to these dangerous materials that are in electronics, that's doing its due diligence is a bit of a challenge. They do exist, so it is important and there are many of them, and they're all over the world, so going into specific ones it's kind of difficult. Sometimes they're hyperlocal organizations that are really looking for as much reuse and re saling ability as possible. Um But there are some other alternatives to this approach, things that couldn't you can't just do with any electronics, but things that might happen in the future. So, for example, there have been some proposals to make a new type of electronics that are dissolvable, in other words, electronics that will actually over time degrade into harmless materials. And the first application that was thought of for this kind of stuff was perhaps for medical devices, so like a temporary medical device that you might have to have surgically implanted. But if it's a device that could over time degrade harmlessly and get absorbed by the body or excreted in some way, then you have eminated the necessity for a follow up surgery, which is a good thing. You know, you want to limit surgeries as much as you can, because every time you have a surgery, that opens up more risk for things like infection. So it's an interesting idea, but you could also apply that same principle to general electronics, not just medical devices. In fact, one of the researchers who was looking into dissolvable electronics had gone so far as to suggest that companies could invest in this technology and then make electronics that really do have an expiration date, Electronics that after a certain amount of time, we're going to start to degrade, which would necessitate you're going out and buying a replacement, which sounds pretty awful from a consumer point of view. I would hate the idea of I saved up money, I got myself this nice smartphone, and then two years later it literally will not work anymore, and I will need to get a new smartphone because the one I have is is decaying too various compounds, harmless compounds. Uh. That might be great for the environment, it's not great for my bank account, it's not great for my morale as a consumer. And you could argue that companies are already kind of doing this, only without the actual dissolving into inorganic or or organic compounds. Part. Where you've got companies that because they are constantly updating the operating systems of the hardware that they are involved with, like Apple or Google with Android, because they're constantly making those those updates. They eventually get to a point where the older hardware cannot support the latest version of the operating system. And the longer you stick with your older device, the further behind you get. So you find you may find that you cannot install certain applications because you can't run the relevant operating system on that hardware. Well, you could argue that that's essentially the same thing designing a device that is kind of in a self destruct mode where it's going to fall apart after a certain amount of time. It's just that in the case of the you know, obsolescence through the operating system, it doesn't come with the benefit of degrading into harmless materials. So it's kind of the worst of all worlds. But still, I don't think a lot of people are going to be calling for dissolvable electronics. I also suspect that this researcher who was suggesting that companies could invest in this technology so that they could make you know, gadgets that become obsolete that the literally break within a certain amount of time. I suspect he was doing this in where to get funding to continue his work, and not that he was arguing that electronics need to break down after a certain amount of time, but rather I need to continue my work in creating this medical technology. I want to make. One way I could do it is to convince big companies to pour some money into it. That's my suspicion. I don't know it for a fact, but there are also other suggestions. One of my favorites is UH to create incentives for companies to create buy back programs. In other words, the companies that make the technology themselves will buy back older versions incarnations of that technology. So let's say that Apple creates a new iPhone, as it does every year, but it also offers a buy back program where it will buy your old iPhone for obviously a big markdown because you've owned it for at least a year, maybe more, and UH, it will take the iPhone off your hands. And from there, maybe the company resells it at a profit, or maybe they take it upon themselves to go through the process of recycling those components in a way that's responsible. UH. The way to really encourage this might be through tax incentive program on a government level, where companies that participate in such practices get nice tax breaks as a result, anyone who has followed any of the major tech companies knows those tech companies love their tax breaks. It's amazing that a company can become like a trillion dollar company and yet not owe any taxes. That's a discussion for another time. It does not belong here. I'm just getting grouchy. But those are some possible ways of approaching this problem that don't go down the same path of uh, exploiting people who are extremely vulnerable. Obviously, those people who are gainfully employed through the recycling industry, even if they're being exploited, it would be really nice if we could come up with a an industry that they could work in where they're not being treated so poorly. But uh, we gotta we gotta start solving the problems where we can and work our way to the bigger, bigger issues because they are huge and there are no easy answers. Life is a complicated thing. But I thought it was important to really address this topic and to urge you that if you have old electronic devices that you need to get rid of, look into the various recycling or you know, resale options that are available to you and give them some serious consideration. Do a little bit more than just googling. Look look into those services, make sure they have a good reputation, and that way you can be a responsible citizen of the of the world. You can avoid as best you can contributing to pollution or to human misery. And I think that's a pretty noble goal that we can all kind of get behind. And uh, as I said at the beginning, I still love technology. I just have to again keep in mind both the positives and the negatives. It's always important to look at the whole picture, not turn a blind eye to stuff just because it's inconvenient. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff, classic from three whole years ago. But yeah, it's it's a challenge figuring out how to take care of e waste in a way that actually is responsible. It takes a little bit of homework. We are fortunate here in Atlanta that there is a facility specifically designed to do that, although of course in the era of the pandemic it is much more challenging to make use of it. But yeah, it's good to kind of do that legwork to make sure that the way you are disposing of your tech is the responsible and safe way to do it. Anyway, I hope you and your loved ones are having happy holidays and that you know we're able to prepare ourselves for whatever two is going to throw at us, because boy howdy, last couple of years have been pretty rough. I have a feeling that at least is going to start out that way. But I'm hoping you are all healthy and happy, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job and Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And we are taking a little break during the holiday season, um so that we can enjoy some time with our our loved ones. But I'm sure many of you out there will be receiving some new tech gear this holiday season, so I thought it would be a great idea to revisit this episode, which originally published on October. It is called E Waste and What to Do with It. So you might find yourself needing to get rid of some older tech. Right, you got new stuff, now you gotta figure out what to do with the old stuff. However, technology can have some pretty nasty components in its stuff that has dangerous materials. So we're gonna learn in this episode the challenges associated with disposing of technology in a safe and responsible manner. Enjoy. So today we're going to talk about e waste or electronic waste, because it's a real problem for many reasons. One of the big ones is that we live in an era in which companies are really pushing out new products at a rapid pace and doing their best to convince you that you need to buy or upgrade or whatever on a frequent basis. That's how these companies make their money, so it comes as no surprise that they would do this. It's the nature of business, and that means a couple of things have to happen to make that business plan actually work. And one of those things is that ideally you make a product that's good, but not so good that your customers will never need another one after they buy the first one. It's the everlasting gobstopper problem of Willy Wonka. If you actually made a candy that never got any smaller and never lost its flavor, people would only buy one and would never need a second one. And where do you go then? So as another example in the tech world, let's let's imagine that you have created a really cool smart watch and it actually has features that people find really compelling. You made the first smart watch that a a larger audience thinks that actually makes a lot of sense. So your market is going to be everybody who might want and who can afford a smart watch. Now, obviously that doesn't include every single human being. Some people are not going to be able to afford it. Some people are not going to be interested in it. But you're trying to target everyone who would want one and who could afford one. So now, let's say you are incredibly successful in an unprecedented move. Somehow you have convinced every single person that's in that target group to buy one of your smart watches. Congratulations, it's a big hit. Only what do you do next. Because you're operating a company, you are not going to magically sell more of those smart watches beyond your target group, because the rest of humanity either doesn't want one, or they can't afford one, or both, So soon you go out of business because you have nothing else to sell. Or let's say instead, you want to make a smart watch, and you've come up with a whole list of really cool, compelling features, but you choose to only implement a selection of those features in your first smart watch. You hold back a few more. Maybe you're holding them back because they're not quite ready. Maybe you're holding back because the technology of the smart watch isn't quite at the point where it can support those features. Or maybe you're doing it just so that you can save some stuff for the next generation of smart watches. You also make your smart watches out of good but not great materials, including stuff like batteries. That way, the smart watches begin to wear out after a set amount of time, maybe a couple of years. And your goal is that you want to win a loyal base of customers, and then you want to convince that same group to turn around and buy the next generation of your hardware, and then do it again and again. That's essentially how a lot of the smartphone industry works, at least for brands like the iPhone. One of the reasons Apple is so successful is as a company, it has managed to convince customers to purchase updated versions of its hardware time and time again, sometimes on an accelerated time scale. It might not happen with every generation for every product, but it happens enough to keep the company really profitable. I'm sure you know people. If you are not one of these people, you probably know somebody who upgrades their iPhone every year, so they get the latest version of the I own every single twelve months. That's the kind of of era we are in. And while that doesn't cover every single Apple customer, it covers a lot of them, and there are a lot more customers who every two years or three years will do this upgrade. And while I could and probably one day will do a full episode about the concept of planned obsolescence. That's where a company makes a product that essentially has an expiration date that the company has made something with the plan of having that thing become obsolete within a certain amount of time. Today, we're gonna look at the other side of that problem. What do we do with the obsolete technology when something better comes along, Whether the technology still works or maybe it's beyond repair, what do we do with it when we're done with it. That's why we're going to talk about electronic waste. And it's a huge category because it includes not just the technology that no longer works or technology that's become obsolete. It includes all tech that is no longer wanted by its original owner. So you might have a phone that's several years old but still works perfectly well, but you'll be confronted with all sorts of advertising and messaging that what you should do is ditch that old phone for something new and shiny with a lot more features. And your old phone, even if it is still in perfect working order becomes e waste. The moment you decide you want a new phone, what happens next is up to you. You have some options. You might choose to recycle your phone, in which case I recommend first you wipe everything off your device, whether it's a phone, a computer, anything that could record your information. You need to wipe that device clean, return it to factory settings, make sure that your personal data is no longer associated with that machine before you turn it in. And I also recommend you do some research into the various services that offer to either cycle components for you, or they're going to donate the device to someone in need, so it's going to be reused rather than recycled. Make sure that that service is reputable. There are some companies that can cause harm through the recycling process or through the smoke screen of donating it to people in need. More on that in just a second. Or maybe you don't want to recycle or reuse, or maybe you just don't have the the services that are readily available, or you're not interested. You just shrug your shoulders and you toss your phone in the trash. That is not a great plan, and it can be against the law depending upon where you live. Many electronics have components in them that are not environmentally friendly, and they don't exactly biodegrade. Electronics might have toxic materials in them. In fact, most of them do, stuff like lead, or arsenic or mercury. Exposure to the elements would cause those chemicals possibly to leach into this rounding environment and it ain't fantastic. So here's some examples of some of the stuff. So lead toxicity can affect every oregan system in our bodies. Lead can inhibit or mimic the actions of calcium and interact with proteins. The nervous system is particularly vulnerable, and lead exposure can cause neurological damage, particularly in children. Mercury is also nasty stuff. It's toxic to the nervous system. It's also toxic to the digestive system and the immune system. It can cause blindness, muscle weakness, impaired movement, and lots of other neurological effects. Arsenic isn't a lot of electronics. That's a carcinogen that's associated with many different types of cancer, and it's also a neurotoxin. You've probably heard of arsenic and old lace yeah, popular poison among UH mystery novelists. It's popular because it's deadly stuff. Beryllium is another dangerous element that's in a lot of electronics. Exposure to brillium is typically pretty minimal for most of us, but you could have continued exposure due to maybe living near, for example, a recycling center that's not doing a good job at containing this stuff. That can lead to health problems ranging from skin diseases to what is called acute beryllium disease, which the symptoms are very similar to pneumonia. It can even lead, although this is pretty rare, to lung cancer. Then there's rominated flame retardants. This is actually a class of synthetic chemicals that are designed to make stuff less flammable. Frequently it tends to be incorporated directly into plastics. Some of them, like p B d e S, have been linked to numerous health risks, including memory and learning problems. Also, thyroid disruption, reduced fertility, advanced puberty, and delayed mental and physical development. So we're talking serious consequences from some of the stuff that's in our electronics. There's also the possibility that if you throw your tech away instead of it going to say a landfill, which is already pretty bad. They might go to an incinerator, which could be even worse because then it gets thrown into a furnace and subjected to high heat, it could produce other pollutants and those could all be released directly into the environment, causing environmental harm and health hazards to the population nearby. Or maybe you take a different choice. Maybe you don't send it off to be reused recycled, maybe you don't throw it away. Maybe it just takes up space in your home. But that's also not great. Sometimes it feels like it's the least bad situation, but you can find ways of have it making sure your device is reused recycled responsibly. I'll talk more about that in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In a Gallop survey found that forty scent of Americans would upgrade their mobile handsets as soon as they were able to according to their phone plans. So in America, until fairly recently, it was really common that these mobile providers would subsidize handset costs through the actual phone service plans themselves, and so the cost of the handsets to the customer were much lower on an upfront basis than you would find in other places in the world. So instead of having to spend several hundred dollars to buy a handset, it might be very cheap, but that cost would be incorporated into your phone plan. It would just be spread out over the course of your contract, which in America would typically last about two years. So every two years your contract would come up and you would become eligible to upgrade your phone for a new contract. And everybody seemed to benefit from this. You got a new phone, the phone company had you for another two years. Ultimately, over the course of those two years, you're probably paying more for that handset than you would if you had bought it all up front. It's just those payments have been spread out over twenty four months. And it seemed like it was a fairly nice proposition, except for the fact that that meant that people were generating a lot of electronic waste. All these old handsets were starting to accumulate, and that's just mobile handsets. Generally speaking. Computer experts say that the average PCs lifespan is somewhere between three and five years. That typically sometime around three to five years, averaging out around four years. People need to upgrade their computers because they're just out of date. They're not running the latest software. Of the parts start to wear out, you know, batteries start to go bad. So then you have to do the same thing with your computer. What do you do with that? That's a larger piece of equipment than a mobile handset. Obviously, TVs tend to stick around a little bit longer, despite the best efforts of various companies out there. Because every time I go to c e S that's the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas every year, it seems like the big push is to come up with a new feature that's going to convince someone who bought a new television last year to do it all over again. But generally speaking, people don't do that because it's pretty expensive. People tend to stick with the same television for un average around seven years before upgrading. I think I'm behind the average there. I don't even I stick with my televisions forever, it seems, but you don't see that happen as frequently. But that still is an issue if you do upgrade. Let's say that Thanksgiving roles around in the States. That's typically when you start seeing these big uh discounts on televisions that came out the year before and stores want to clear out those inventories to make way for new TVs they're coming in in the new year. Uh. You can get these crazy deals on what looks to be like a great bar in for a television, but that means you have to do something with your old TV. Again electronic waste, and there are larger appliances that we tend to stick with until we need to replace them. Right Like, not a lot of people sit there and say I want a new washer and dryer unless their old washer and dryer is either become unreliable or has just plane broken. But eventually we do have to replace these things. So pretty much anything that has circuitry or electrical components fits into the category of e waste, from lamps to washing machines or smart watches to large screen televisions, and electronic waste is one of the fastest growing types of waste in the world. As we see technology adoption increase in new markets like Africa, we're seeing those numbers climb rapidly. Now developed countries do tend to produce a lot more E waste. As a rule, China is known for producing most of it, and if you're looking at it from a percentage point and looking at each nation, China leads the way, but America is not super far behind. When it comes the highest amount of E waste generated per inhabitant. You gotta look over toward Australia, Polynesia, Micronesia and that area. They generate the most E waste per inhabitant, but there are very few people they're compared to other parts of the world, so it doesn't amount to as much in a grand scheme of things. The cost of consumer electronics also continues to drop. That makes electronics more accessible to a wider group of people, and I think that's a good thing. I think have more people having access to technology is great. In general. It's very important accessibility, making sure that we start to whittle away at that gap between the halves and the have nots. However, when you pair this with the trend of pushing people to adopt and then abandoned technology rapidly in favor of the next new thing, it really exacerbates the problem of E waste. In the United Nations released a report on e waste that looked into trends and challenges, and that report found that by the lobal production of E waste had hit forty four point seven million metric tons of junct tech. That's the equivalent of four thousand, five hundred Eiffel towers. That means, on average, each inhabitant produced six point one ks or nearly thirteen and a half pounds of electronic waste. In twenty sixteen, it was more like five point eight kilograms or twelve point eight pounds, so the trend was on the rise. Not only are we generating more, we're generating more per person. Only of all of that e waste was properly documented as being recycled or reused under was considered to be the the appropriate guidelines. So, according to the United Nations, of the forty four point seven million metric tons of e waste produced by twenty sixteen, one point seven million tons of it got thrown into residual waste in higher income countries, which pretty much means they either ended up in landfills or in incinerators. Only eight point nine million tons was documented as collected and recycled, so it's possible the more waste is being recycled than we know about, but it's undocumented and unverified, which ain't great, and since the trend seems to be on the rise, this is really bad news. Now again, according to the u N report, by twenty twenty one will see E waste hit fifty two point two million metric tons. I'm citing the United Nations a lot, but I should also point out that it's very, very difficult to get an accurate representation of exactly how big this problem is because a lot of countries do not collect or publish statistics about electronic waste, and in some cases you may not be entirely certain that the findings that are being reported are accurate. So some of the numbers that the UN relies upon come from estimates as a result of doing some investigation and then extrapolating those results to get a bigger picture of view of what might be going on. And there are a lot of advocacy groups out there that really want to tackle E waste, and that is a good thing. I don't disagree with their motivation. However, I will say that sometimes some of these groups tend to present numbers that I personally cannot track down to a verifiable source, that is less good. I definitely agree we need to acknowledge and tackle the e waste problem in a responsible way. However, presenting information as fact without any evidence to back it up is a really good way to allow people who oppose your philosophy a means of criticizing your methods. So, in other words, you're just opening up the door for someone to tear down your argument, because if they can say this number you're citing as fact has no evidence to back it up, then it's like they're saying, well, you're arguing that something is a problem, but you can't even prove to me that the problem exists. That's not great. Many developed nations do have various programs in place to deal with electronic waste, things that you are supposed to do if you are trying to get rid of old electronics. However, these various programs aren't always followed properly, and in fact, some practices that are commonplace in these countries are technically illegal. However, they are rarely enforced, so you might see people throw stuff out in the garbage when they're supposed to follow a very different protocol, but because there's not really any way of policing that, and even if there were, there's not a high likelihood of it being prosecuted. There's no teeth to any legislation. People have to do it because they want to be responsible, not because they're worried about being punished otherwise. So appealing to people's responsibility, to their to their desire to be a good person might be more helpful. Just because it's not very practical in most cases to come up with pollution police developing nation have it fairly rough. Uh. These are the countries that did not benefit from gradually developing this technology and building out an infrastructure to support it. Instead, they leap frogged into the modern era of electronics without having done that, and so they aren't able to deal with the consequences as readily as the rest of the world, which has kind of grown into this. So I'm talking about places like lots of countries in Africa which have thankfully gotten access to things like cell towers, cell phones, a lot of cellular based technologies, but they did this by leap frogging other developments, and they don't have the systems in place to handle e waste. And it's also true and unfortunate that the people who are at least able to afford the problems that come along with electronic waste are the same ones who have to deal with it. In many cases, there's also an issue with developing countries accepting e waste for recycling purposes. Essentially, you've got UH places that will either accept or they will actually go out and buy electronic waste from other countries, which is not necessarily a bad thing on the surface. Recycling can be an industry unto itself, and it can provide a valuable service while recapturing some of the raw materials that were used to make electronics. The u N actually reported that those raw materials were worth about fifty five billion euro in UH in twenty sixteen. The euro averaged out to be about one point one dollars per euro, so that would be that the raw materials were worth around sixty billion dollars. So it would definitely be better too to reclaim some of that value to leverage it rather than just throw it out if you can do that. UH and I talked about some of the harmful materials that are in electronics, but they can also contain some really valuable stuff In it like goal to copper alumium and steal. But the bad part comes into play with the practices and processes for recycling electronics. If there are a few protections in place and a recycling center is not following careful protocols, the process of recycling can be very harmful to the environment as well as really the people who are working at that facility and for the surrounding population as a as a possibility. A lot of these places, the reason why they are an attractive place to send recycling for the rest of the world is that it's inexpensive to do it um And part of the reason for that is because in a lot of these countries the cost of labor is low, meaning they're not paying people very much. And uh that becomes a delicate balance too, because if the amount you're spending to recycle is larger than the amount you're getting back, you're in a losing proposition. So you can't continue to operate that way. But in order for you to do this in an efficient way, you have to find out, you know, what's a what's a low cost method of recycling this stuff? And it tends to be sending it to very poor nations that very low wages and often do not treat their employees very well. There's a terrible standard of living, and the measures that are supposed to be there in order to ensure people's safety may not be there at all, so it's very worrisome. Typically, the way a recycling center would process electronic waste would follow a pattern. So first it would have to get this electronic waste, which is a non trivial problem. Transporting materials requires energy, um it has an economic impact. So if it takes a lot of energy, if it takes a lot of money to get the electronic waste to the recycling center, you could be operating in a loss, which means it's a nonstarter once you get it. The next step could be an assessment of each piece of electronic waste, because some of these devices could be in good working order. Then if it's operable, or if you can do repairs on it and make it operable, you might want to resell that device for a profit and keep it in use. And that's one of the best options out there, honestly, because it increases the utility of a device beyond its initial lifespan with its original owner, and you don't have to go through the rest of this process. People can still get use out of it. It removes the necessity to make a new one of those, so it is reusing is one of the best options. In fact, reusing in general, when you're looking at reusing versus recycling, tends to be one of the best options out there. However, it can be tricky to do because sometimes it's not the easiest thing to repair some of these gadgets. More in that in just a second. But if you can do it, that tends to be step one. Sort out all the stuff that could actually be reclaimed, reused, resold. Next, assuming we're going to then reclaim the stuff inside the electronics that you cannot sell again. Maybe they're irreparably broken, maybe they're obsolete. Maybe there's no demand for those electronics, so they might work, but you're never going to sell them anyway, but just because no one wants them. Then you want to disassemble the device to get at the various components inside of it, especially the components that were really interested in, the ones that have materials like gold or copper on them. But that's not always easy to do, and this is also why it's very difficult to repair some types of electronics. More and more electronic devices are being locked away in their form factors. Like in the old days, good old days, children sit down, used to be able to take electronics apart and mess with them. So you hear a lot of stories about how young engineers when they were kids would take apart very gadgets in order to learn how they worked, and then would put them back together again and they would work. Still these days, it's a lot harder to do that because a lot of electronics are not designed to be taken apart. The industry as a whole has moved to a model that's difficult to do that. Apple is notorious for this. You get a new iPhone that is not meant to be taken apart. You are not meant to take the battery out of that. It is meant to be a single, unified device for its useful life. The company this way can keep a really tight control on how its technology is used. They have a lot of control over it as a platform. But this comes at a price. Manufacturers tend to use a lot of glue these days. That makes it really tricky to take the stuff apart, and it just makes it hard not just to do repairs, but to get at the various components in order to do some recycling. Now, if the device has parts that are particularly valuable, those might be set aside for resale value. Now this is particularly true for like older television and things like that. You might find that there's some working components in there that you can take apart or take out of the device and then sell those as replacement parts or repair parts, and then just recycled the rest of the stuff. Now, once you've disassembled the tech and you've removed anything that can easily be resold, then you would put it through a shredder to grind the components down into smaller pieces. Typically, after that point you would have some human employees go through this shredded material and remove anything that might be overtly hazardous, like pieces of battery, and then everything that's left over after you remove the hazardous stuff gets shredded again into even smaller pieces. Then you need to separate out those pieces into different stuff. One way you might do this is using a really big magnet and pass it over the shredded material. Anything that's uh this ferrist is going to be attracted to the magnet and we'll get pulled up by it, and you can then separate that out. Uh. You might otherwise need to use various methodologies to sort the particles into different densities which will represent different materials, and thus you get different piles of stuff. Um, there's a lot of things like centrifuges or platforms that shake a lot to help sort the stuff out, and you do this over and over again until you've got your various piles and stuff that has like precious metals might end up being uh exposed to an acid bath to burn away anything that isn't that metal, and then the pieces of metal can be gathered together and then eventually smelted into ingots. Glass and plastics can be separated for reprocessing. And then you have done everything you could to reclaim as much as you could from those devices. And if you've done it carefully and responsibly, you've done it without releasing toxic fumes or toxic materials into the environment or harming your employees. That's easier said than done. It is a challenging thing. It is possible you can do recycling responsibly, but it requires a lot of careful work and governance. I have more to say about electronic waste, but before I get to it, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So on October eighteen, which was just a few days before I jumped into the studio to record this episode, the world had its very first International E Waste Day. The goal there was not to generate more electronic waste, but rather to raise awareness of proper recycling and reuse programs for electronics, raising awareness over the illegal selling of e waste two countries that are buying it for processing and also for data mining. That's something that you should keep in mind that some of these companies that are offering to take electronics off your hands might actually be going through them very carefully to see if there's any data they can they can get from it, any personal data, any like logins, that kind of stuff. This actually does happen, and it happens on a pretty big basis, And because these companies will often send all this electronic waste to some other country that's outside the jurisdiction of whatever country you live in. I'm talking about the United States in particular because that's where I live, but it happens all over the world. That's a dangerous thing, and then they'll sell that data to interested buyers UM often wholesale. They'll just sell huge amounts of data at a time. That's one way of doing it. So it's very important to look at various UH resources online in order to get an idea of the reputation of the various services that are available out there for you to use for recycling or reusing. UM recycling can be economically difficult to support unless you're talking about markets that have those very low costs of labor, like I said before, the low salaries with no benefits, bad working conditions, that kind of thing. So it is a very tricky subject without it being more profitable than the only people who are willing to do it are going to be the ones who aren't having to spend so much money to go through the process in the first place. So finding a reputable service that will recycle electronics in a way that is responsible, it's not exploitative of its workforce, it's not exposing the environment needlessly to these dangerous materials that are in electronics, that's doing its due diligence is a bit of a challenge. They do exist, so it is important and there are many of them, and they're all over the world, so going into specific ones it's kind of difficult. Sometimes they're hyperlocal organizations that are really looking for as much reuse and re saling ability as possible. Um But there are some other alternatives to this approach, things that couldn't you can't just do with any electronics, but things that might happen in the future. So, for example, there have been some proposals to make a new type of electronics that are dissolvable, in other words, electronics that will actually over time degrade into harmless materials. And the first application that was thought of for this kind of stuff was perhaps for medical devices, so like a temporary medical device that you might have to have surgically implanted. But if it's a device that could over time degrade harmlessly and get absorbed by the body or excreted in some way, then you have eminated the necessity for a follow up surgery, which is a good thing. You know, you want to limit surgeries as much as you can, because every time you have a surgery, that opens up more risk for things like infection. So it's an interesting idea, but you could also apply that same principle to general electronics, not just medical devices. In fact, one of the researchers who was looking into dissolvable electronics had gone so far as to suggest that companies could invest in this technology and then make electronics that really do have an expiration date, Electronics that after a certain amount of time, we're going to start to degrade, which would necessitate you're going out and buying a replacement, which sounds pretty awful from a consumer point of view. I would hate the idea of I saved up money, I got myself this nice smartphone, and then two years later it literally will not work anymore, and I will need to get a new smartphone because the one I have is is decaying too various compounds, harmless compounds. Uh. That might be great for the environment, it's not great for my bank account, it's not great for my morale as a consumer. And you could argue that companies are already kind of doing this, only without the actual dissolving into inorganic or or organic compounds. Part. Where you've got companies that because they are constantly updating the operating systems of the hardware that they are involved with, like Apple or Google with Android, because they're constantly making those those updates. They eventually get to a point where the older hardware cannot support the latest version of the operating system. And the longer you stick with your older device, the further behind you get. So you find you may find that you cannot install certain applications because you can't run the relevant operating system on that hardware. Well, you could argue that that's essentially the same thing designing a device that is kind of in a self destruct mode where it's going to fall apart after a certain amount of time. It's just that in the case of the you know, obsolescence through the operating system, it doesn't come with the benefit of degrading into harmless materials. So it's kind of the worst of all worlds. But still, I don't think a lot of people are going to be calling for dissolvable electronics. I also suspect that this researcher who was suggesting that companies could invest in this technology so that they could make you know, gadgets that become obsolete that the literally break within a certain amount of time. I suspect he was doing this in where to get funding to continue his work, and not that he was arguing that electronics need to break down after a certain amount of time, but rather I need to continue my work in creating this medical technology. I want to make. One way I could do it is to convince big companies to pour some money into it. That's my suspicion. I don't know it for a fact, but there are also other suggestions. One of my favorites is UH to create incentives for companies to create buy back programs. In other words, the companies that make the technology themselves will buy back older versions incarnations of that technology. So let's say that Apple creates a new iPhone, as it does every year, but it also offers a buy back program where it will buy your old iPhone for obviously a big markdown because you've owned it for at least a year, maybe more, and UH, it will take the iPhone off your hands. And from there, maybe the company resells it at a profit, or maybe they take it upon themselves to go through the process of recycling those components in a way that's responsible. UH. The way to really encourage this might be through tax incentive program on a government level, where companies that participate in such practices get nice tax breaks as a result, anyone who has followed any of the major tech companies knows those tech companies love their tax breaks. It's amazing that a company can become like a trillion dollar company and yet not owe any taxes. That's a discussion for another time. It does not belong here. I'm just getting grouchy. But those are some possible ways of approaching this problem that don't go down the same path of uh, exploiting people who are extremely vulnerable. Obviously, those people who are gainfully employed through the recycling industry, even if they're being exploited, it would be really nice if we could come up with a an industry that they could work in where they're not being treated so poorly. But uh, we gotta we gotta start solving the problems where we can and work our way to the bigger, bigger issues because they are huge and there are no easy answers. Life is a complicated thing. But I thought it was important to really address this topic and to urge you that if you have old electronic devices that you need to get rid of, look into the various recycling or you know, resale options that are available to you and give them some serious consideration. Do a little bit more than just googling. Look look into those services, make sure they have a good reputation, and that way you can be a responsible citizen of the of the world. You can avoid as best you can contributing to pollution or to human misery. And I think that's a pretty noble goal that we can all kind of get behind. And uh, as I said at the beginning, I still love technology. I just have to again keep in mind both the positives and the negatives. It's always important to look at the whole picture, not turn a blind eye to stuff just because it's inconvenient. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff, classic from three whole years ago. But yeah, it's it's a challenge figuring out how to take care of e waste in a way that actually is responsible. It takes a little bit of homework. We are fortunate here in Atlanta that there is a facility specifically designed to do that, although of course in the era of the pandemic it is much more challenging to make use of it. But yeah, it's good to kind of do that legwork to make sure that the way you are disposing of your tech is the responsible and safe way to do it. Anyway, I hope you and your loved ones are having happy holidays and that you know we're able to prepare ourselves for whatever two is going to throw at us, because boy howdy, last couple of years have been pretty rough. I have a feeling that at least is going to start out that way. But I'm hoping you are all healthy and happy, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.