Photo:Curtis Palmer, Creative Commons, Flickr

Finally getting that new phone or laptop you’ve wanted all year? Where is the old one going? Probably to China, India or Thailand where environmental laws are lax. It’s called electronic dumping, and while Americans complain about China dumping cheap imports into the US that we actually consume, we dump hazardous waste into China that could cause generations of ill health to their citizens.

Buy it, use it, trash it, do it again. How many people actually think about the consequences of the consumption cycle? We want our new toy. Let someone else deal with its disposal. Well, someone else is.

New Yorkers had a chance to do so early in the new year. A small local community organization based on the Lower East Side recently made a symbolic gesture towards electronics recycling by spending a day at Union Square collecting used phones and computers. The Environmental Protection Agency has set up a recycling program in New England. Residents in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley can bring their electronic recycles to Green Citizen, a company specializing in the responsible disposal of electronics.

Mom used to tell us to clean up our own messes, but that’s easier said than done. Even though the topic is often in the media – the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and even Wikipedia discusses electronic waste – it’s not as important or glamorous as global warming because we can’t see it (and because Al Gore hasn’t made a movie about it). But it’s here and it’s real. So maybe it's time for us to start thinking.