Motherboard

Sometimes it seems like throwing away your cell phone is a good idea if you don’t want to get cancer. But it’s worth keeping in mind that more than ever, doing so might give cancer to lots of other people.

Even as we try to take care of our own crap (whether its electronics companies keeping it at home: or designers turning it into Olympic medals), electronic waste is one of the developed world’s biggest exports, and by 2020 the piles of e-waste are likely to rise by 500% in developing countries. That’s what a doozy of a study by the UN says (pdf). And it singles out the United States the major culprit, creating around 3 million metric tons of e-waste a year. There’s no app for that.

Not surprisingly but somewhat ironically is the runner-up: China produces around 2.3 million metric tons of waste domestically, even while its informal recycling industry is already saturated by much of the developed world’s e-waste. By informal recycling industry, we mean dozens of ramshackle villages where kids make a living tearing gold out of circuit boards, if they’re not already deathly ill from the air and water.

Growing gadget use in China points to a new source of the problem: the developing countries themselves are increasingly using computers and talking on mobile phones, and presumably throwing away in not the safest ways either (though, it’s safe to say, not as fast as richer countries are). That’s the lesson of yet another UN study that predicts mobile phone subscribers worldwide will number 5 billion by the end of the year.

Can You Hear Me Now?

But therein also lies a solution: lots of people in poor countries want phones, and they’d be perfectly happy with the perfectly good phone that we no longer want because it doesn’t play MP3s. That’s why it’s called e-waste—because it’s waste, not garbage, and its value doesn’t just lie in the precious metals that get extracted at poisonous cost. It’s more valuable as a tool for doing basic banking, being a better farmer and getting your medicine.

For now though, it’s not easy to turn your old phone into someone’s new phone. The best option may be to turn your phone over to an organization like Lifeline for Africa or its partner Recellular which turns your used phones into cash for charity. The EPA also has a guide to recycling, which reminds us that mmost cell phone stores will safely dispose of your phone. I also wrote a guide full of stats and tips at Treehugger.

But there’s good reason to still feel pretty bad: without close scrutiny, it’s hard to know how sustainable our “sustainable” recycling methods are, we don’t have a very good system for donating phones to poor countries, and implementing standards for electronic waste recycling in poor countries can be like trying to fight internet piracy.

But we’re not going to dig out of this pile of crappy facts so long as we remain dumbly knee-deep in the persistent argument, in the name of “economics,” that this system is just, you know, the way things go.

The principle of “let’s dump our toxic stuff elsewhere because poor countries need the money and the environment has no value” was perhaps most famously enshrined in 1991, by then-World Bank economist Larry Summers—former secretary of the Treasury, Harvard pres, Obama White House economist. In a memo that may forever haunt poor people in the developing world (and that may or may not have been intended as satire), Summers wrote, “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”

Maybe that’s why they don’t study economics much in Korle Lagoon, or Tavros, or Guiyu.