Moving away from food waste to other wastes, I like to take up technology waste in comparison to other wastes like clothing or construction wasyes. I will give my thoughts on those in future notes unless others do before that. But in this post, I explore, how it matters to the sustenance of our world by providing a comparison of organic waste and inorganic waste.
Technology waste, the way I see it has four components, software, hardware, power and people. When I was about say that someone has gone crazy by talking to himself, I was stopped to let me notice the blue tooth device in the ear and helping me to understand the things we progressed into.
When you realize that these tiny device die after the battery that powers them cannot be charged anymore, you see the hardware and power waste. Granted that my power socket has been operating since Edison days, you can see the waste we are not paying much attention to. If those tiny devices are multiplied by billion ears, and when they are all dumped at one place, you see the mountain of waste we have produced. When you realize that these tiny devices will be thrown away, even when healthy, when there is an upgraded protocol for Communicating, we see both software and people waste and how acute the problem is. In comparison, compare the waste in rice or wheat production that we need to sustain us, the so called efficient recycleble objects on earth, humans, to the technology waste.
Just stop and think, how we have started producing waste in our homes with land line phones that catered to a family needs as a unit to mobile phones that now cater to individual units. Remote communications have not changed, but how often we communicate and when has changed to produce more waste. Even then, have we made the world a better place?
We get affected by what happens somewhere else in the world than being cognizant of what is affecting us within the physical boundaries of the places we wake, sleep and move. We get displaced mentally, without realizing how the air we breathe or the water we drink in our immediate vicinity is affecting us and the community that we depend on to survive.
So what have done by being able to connect every human being to another, yet unable to stop producing waste and stop protecting the only planet that one day may stop functioning organically?
So before you dump your iPhones to the next new shiny ones, think of all the waste and send a message back to its producers to be innovative to be able to use the device like the power socket at home that supports your appliances many times longer than the several upgrades of the phones in the same period of time. IPhones are just one example of technology waste, but they stand out because of their approach to producing newer phones.