The Throw Away Society

On average, I will spend about six hours on my laptop and four hours on my phone daily. Ten hours of consuming media, advertisements and energy. Much of my time on the internet is spent either doing researching for assignments, watching shows or going on social media.

My parents gave me both my laptop and my phone as gifts for college and my birthday respectively.

I’ve owned a cellphone since fifth grade, and before phones had the ability to hold music, I paired my phone with an iPod, 3 different ones over the course of five or six years. The first phone I ever had was the LG env2, which was replaced for falling into the toilet in a middle school bathroom, then again for being flung off of a trampoline only to land on cement pavement. Two years after the trampoline incident, I moved up to the iPhone 4s, which was replaced twice for completely shattering. Currently I own a cracked iPhone 6s.

The phones that are currently available are constantly changing and the durability of phones, especially the market dominating iPhone, has dramatically decreased compared to phones of the past. The fragility and rapid evolution of these technologies has created a wasteful society that keeps getting new phones and laptops without thinking about the amount of resources it takes to create them. Companies and phone providers keep pushing consumers to buy the next big piece of technology and even have gotten rid of some phone plans to urge consumers to update regularly. Consumers are constantly replacing phones that are working perfectly for ones with slight variations contributing to what is called a “throwaway society” (Gabrys 80). We rely on technology so heavily we can’t help but have to regularly update in order to escape the feeling of becoming obsolete. I myself have gone through five phones in the past nine years, a very wasteful and energy consuming practice.

Not only is it an unsustainable practice, but it also degrades the health of developing countries. The e-waste created in developed nations are usually sent out to developing nations such as India. This waste, which is being created at an astonishing rate, gets piled up and stripped of its usable materials in sites that are unsafe to workers and the environment. Unhealthy and unregulated practices like cooking plastic wires over open fires to get the metal or acid baths are all common ways of “recycling” e-waste (Gabrys 95) (LeBel 12).

Most of the gadgets my family has owned haven’t been disposed of. The drawer in the guest bedroom of my house is filled with ancient artifacts like BlackBerries, flip phones, iPod (cracked ones and all) a few laptops and video cameras. My parents either send them to relatives in India or use them as backups. Most of the things my family buys technology wise are always either stored or given to family members or neighbors who may want them.

Many tech savvy people in my age group ache for gadget updates, constantly itching to get the latest and greatest phone on the market. This is adding to the growing e-waste stream, which according to Sabine LeBelis one of the fastest growing streams of waste. They are quick to throw the phone they bought a few months ago in the bin for the newest model, the one with a screen one and a half centimeters bigger than the last model that came out five months ago. I however, don’t particularly care much about keeping up with gadgets, or at least compared to the people shivering outside waiting in line two nights before the next iPhone comes out. I generally update my phone or laptop when it breaks or is unusable. However, this doesn’t mean that I am not part of the growing problem. As a consumeristic society we need to rethink what it means to be successful. Our view of success is quantified in material objects. This attitude is a major contributing factor to why we consume and waste so much why companies are able to successfully push products at such a rapid rate.

#technotrash #sustainable #ewaste #opinion #hampshire #newleaf