First, you may be hiding your eyes from the problem.
Here are some links to articles on it:
This is kind of an overview of the problem.
(NYTimes is likely to hit you up for a subscription.) This is a bit more in-depth:
Lots of "recycling" is cover for shipping to countries in Africa, east Asia, South America, and other countries with poor economies, where really poor people are paid dirt wages to poison themselves, shorten their lifespans, and mess up their children's genes.
And that is in spite of the fact that the materials in electronics waste are rather valuable.
This talks about why it's a hard problem. Even in a developed country like Sweden, even with more advanced recycling methods, workers are exposed to the poisons.
Continually keeping your electronics hardware modern has a huge cost. The purchase price is the tip of the iceberg.
Even just learning how to separate your data from the OS and the applications so you can periodically back it all up, wipe the disks, and do a clean re-install will allow you to keep using your hardware at least twice as long. If we could all do that, we could easily cut the electronics waste in half.
If you are willing to give Microsoft the boot, there are many operating systems based on the Linux kernel or one of the BSDs, which can give you efficient and effective use of computers too old to run MSWindows at all -- five, ten years, or more.
Up until last year, China accepted a lot of our electronics waste.
I can no longer find the references, but the initial reports I read about where the most recent Corona virus came from indicated that it had crossed the species gap from animal to human in the kinds of towns in China where electronics and other poisonous waste was regularly being processed, and was first recognized in the Wuhan district of China, where a lot of those who would have contact with the impoverished workers would be concentrated for logistics and management purposes.
This would be no surprise. Overwork, crowded conditions, lack of hygiene, shortfalls of nutrition, immune systems already taking damage from other causes create a ripe field for the jump.
China has since banned imports of electronics waste, and has been stonewalling on the topic of the virus, so much that their total mortality numbers are impossible to believe, and the source of the initial outbreak of record has moved to the Wuhan capital itself.
Yeah, this sounds like a conspiracy theory. And? Have we some reason to believe the Chinese government has become less willing to alter the flow of information to serve their purposes? I don't think so.
Statistically, if you are healthy, you are less likely to catch it. If you do, you are less likely to become seriously ill. There are statistical outliers, of course. There always are. But, statistically speaking, being healthy is your best defense, a defense not really available in impoverished communities.
It's easy to think you can't afford to do what's necessary to keep your electronics around. Competition won't allow it. The bottom line won't allow it. If you take time for these kinds of things, you won't be able to keep yourself in the billionaire club.
But it comes back to you. This pandemic is not going away until we can learn to slow down and take care of these kinds of things.
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