Have you ever had the urge just to chuck your garbage onto your neighbor’s lawn instead of paying for someone to pick it up each month? Yeah, I know, it’s a tough compulsion to resist … but what if your neighbor’s house was behind yours, so it wouldn’t be as easy to see? So what if your garbage is toxic; it’s cheaper to send it their way instead of forking over the cash to dispose of it yourself!

Unfortunately, this is the reality of the disposal of e-waste. An article in National Geographic detailed the process of countries from the developed world shipping their e-waste — used computers, TVs, cell phones and other electronics — to developing countries in Asia and Western Africa. It’s actually cheaper for companies, including the brokers who receive materials from recycling plants, to send these electronics overseas than to try to separate them into reusable materials.

While a few recycling plants for electronics do exist in the United States, it’s hardly a cost-effective alternative to simply sending everything across the ocean for someone else to death with. What’s especially frightening is that these electronics contain lead, bromide, mercury, chromium, cadmium and a host of other toxins that are sent into the air when people in developing countries incinerate these old electronics to burn away flame retardants in order to receive compensation for any metal they recover.

Toxins in the air, soil and water are not easily removed — these are problems that affect the health of people in countries where environmental standards and health care are far from the standard of the developed world. People use the same pots to process lead as cook dinner — talk about being neighborly.

The problem lies in the fact that the United States and other developed countries want to stay ahead in the profit game, even if it means poisoning the competitors who are finishing at the end of the technological race. While the European Union has set sanctions against simply shipping e-waste elsewhere, those sanctions are not foolproof. It’s as if people think that all they have to worry about is their little plot of land — once something is out of that area, it doesn’t exist anymore.

There is legislation that has yet to take effect from the 1989 Basel Convention that prohibits exporting hazardous waste, but, like the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has signed but not ratified it. That’s the equivalent of acknowledging that someone is kicking trash into your neighbor’s yard without taking responsibility for punting it there in the first place.

For all the e-waste we create, especially with our obsession for the latest and newest technology, we really don’t think about the rate at which we replace it compared to how we manufacture it. There are a lot of machines that can be taken apart and pieces can be used elsewhere, or they can be fixed and reused instead of discarded and engulfed in toxic flames somewhere else.

As consumers, we need to demand goods made out of more recyclable materials. As producers, we need to realize that this is a global economy — when we send toxic materials to the developing countries we rely on to make our cheap goods, those toxins are going to filter back. Ah, the circle of life.

I highly recommend picking up a copy of this month’s National Geographic simply to see the pictures of wastelands of computer mouses (or is it mice?), circuit boards and computer monitors.

With advanced technology comes a constant stream of innovation, but more so, responsibility. If you want your consumer to constantly replace all their electronics, you need to figure out a way to dispose of the old ones safely — a way that doesn’t involve simply shoving them under the proverbial bed. I used to do this when cleaning my room — eventually, I ran out of space and my mom just got mad at me. It’s really not the best plan of action.

If companies made their products more recyclable and more recycling plants were built specifically for disassembling e-waste safely and fixing electronics, at least people in developing countries could listen to a radio or watch TV without having to inhale carcinogens and drink contaminated water all day long.

We are a developed nation with the means to change this. Cost might go up, but I can take responsibility for my addiction to consuming by taking the heat. I don’t need a new cell phone every few years, and even though it’s my freedom to get one, I need to realize that my cell phone could end up in a heap of garbage in Asia or Africa. Does our wealth as a country merit this kind of trashy (excuse the pun) behavior, or does our wealth as a country necessitate us to know better?

Cathy Wilson is a junior journalism major. Send her an e-mail at cw224805@ohiou.edu and she will do her best not to expunge it accidentally.