Where Have All the Cell Phones Gone, Long Time Passing?

We are gadget-crazy - replacing our old ones with the latest and greatest as soon as we can find the dough to do so.  What happens to all the old gadgets?  Thought you'd never ask!

Below is an important excerpt from Scientific American's article, "Gadgets are Garbage."  Read the rest of the article by clicking this sentence.



"Every now and then the public rises up to make an industry clean up its environmental act. As a result, car companies now offer hybrids, electrics and alternative-fuel cars. Beverage companies are making their bottles with a lot less plastic. New laws have reduced the chemicals that cause acid rain by 76 percent since 1980. And so on.


One industry in particular, however, continues to leave a disastrous eco-wake, because no such public pressure exists: consumer electronics.

You know those one billion cell phones we buy every year? Those 100 million cameras? That infinitude of laptops, Game Boys, TV sets and music players? Most of the ones we replace go to the dump. The Environmental Protection Agency calculated that in 2007, we threw away 2.25 million tons of electronics—82 percent of it into the landfill. That’s a lot of toxic chemicals and nasty metals that you really, really don’t want leaching into the water supply."