Australia's E-Waste A Ticking Time Bomb Analysis

Heather Roger claims our current garbage disposal methods are short term and etiquette. Rogers’s position is clear that we need to minimize the use of landfills and create better means to discard trash. In supporting Rogers’s environment views I think that we need to create a more economic and environmental friendly garbage disposal system. Heather Rogers and Lars Eighner both acknowledge the issue with society’s throwaway mentality. Eighner proves that we throw away perfectly working stuff, having survived off others discarded materials. Eighner argues against excessive waste we create but does not have any prospected solutions. Whereas Rogers acknowledges the obvious need to minimize our consumption of waste but argues the need

Do cities and other places have to pay to recycle?”Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill”(The Reign of Recycling). Recycling is more expensive but has more benefits than sending garbage to the landfill. Sending garbage to a landfill causes land pollution people need to be educated, have changed attitudes, and motivated to change and solve this problem.

As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Stay In Denial, by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan, is a graphic novel about the state of our environment. They use cartoons and abundant sarcasm to convey the message that the attempts people are making to save the environment are not enough to do any real good. Their message challenges both those of Edward O. Wilson and the University of Connecticut in that Jensen and McMillan’s ideas are much more radical and suggest that the ideas posed by Wilson and UConn, such as the importance of recycling and sustainability efforts, are ineffective at saving the environment. We must resolve the challenges posed by Jensen and McMillan so that all of the ideas put forth in the sources may work together rather than against each other. In order to do this we must accept that some of the ideas given by Jensen and McMillan may be too extreme to do any real good and that the ideas suggested by Wilson and UConn, though slightly ineffective, are nonetheless important steps in saving the environment. Taken alone, none of their ideas will save the environment; instead it is necessary to combine the ideas of Wilson, UConn, and Jensen and McMillan in order to create a more realistic plan to save the planet.

Americans, as a whole, do not care about the environment anymore. When we watch the news or simply talk about our day, there are always more pressing topics that come up. However, as a nation, the threat of a failing environment seems to be forgotten because the effects are not as obvious as other threats. Bill McKibben’s “Waste Not, Want Not” discusses how much time, money, resources, and people America has actually wasted and how little effort has been made to try to change. McKibben causes readers to think it is too late to save the environment from our wastefulness because we put our efforts into systems that do not help the environment, spend more money and resources than necessary, and refuse to acknowledge how much were wasting.

In addition, there exist some environmental risks related to producing landfill. Even though the Australian Federal Government is not offering incentives to repurpose waste, some communities and State and Local governments are offering incentives for this practice. The main purpose of this is to avoid the disposing of waste in landfills, due to the fact that it requires so much time, energy and space, injuring our planet's health (McCabe,

As a nation, we have to look at what the future would be for our children, their children and the generations ahead. We can start with participating in recycle programs, investing in clean energy and ways to reduce destruction of our forests." Without Americans constant need to consume, the environment would have plenty of time to replenish the resources it provide us." "NIEHS Environmental Coloring Book." National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, an official government website for Kids. 02 Apr. 2009 .

As used electronics is becoming a waster hazard worldwide local governments such as where I live include programs at local waste stations purely for electronics. This encourages local residents to freely drop off their electronic waste, like TV’s and computers and mobile phones to these locations where the waste is sorted and than shipped to facilities that can process this waste appropriately which also includes recycling as much material as possible. This has a

From that “. . . cheese with a spot of mold” to that “. . . half jar of peanut butter” (64). Furthermore, I think that if people read this essay they may realize that some of the stuff they call trash is actually not trash at all. This essay personally made me become more thankful that I don’t have to dumpster dive just to be able to eat. Likewise, I began to understand that I and others “throw away perfectly good stuff” that really shouldn’t be in the trash (64). By making an effort to reduce my waste, I will reduce my ecological footprint on the earth and ultimately leave more resources for further

It has become the new “norm” with people to replace their electronics because their devices become out of date or they feel like they have to have the latest thing. In the article “Our E-Waste Problem Is Ridiculous, And Gadget Makers Aren’t Helping,” by Christina Bonnington, the author discusses how people buy new electronics every year when they come out and the old ones get abandoned. She also talks about how many people aren’t properly recycling their old devices and how some electronics can be impossible to recycle the right way. She also talks

“In Waste Not, Want Not” author Bill McKibben, makes several arguments about how wasteful Americans are. Throughout the essay McKibben provides facts that show the degree of how much waste is built up daily. The author emphasizes waste throughout the essay by giving the reader an idea of much plastic, aluminum, paper, lithium, and food are wasted daily. If humans do not come together to help reduce the amount of waste, eventually planet earth will not be able to provide a stable environment to sustain life. Life as we know it is slowly coming closer and closer to the end, and without a joint effort to protect the environment and limit waste the end of life will come sooner than expected.

As humans, we have always looked to develop our environment solely based on tangible content, all done without any dividing barriers. However, throughout recent history, we have been at the forefront of a complete shift in the way that our society functions as a whole. Our newly founded dependency on technology has been more than evident, with it now taking up a substantial chunk out of our daily lives. What once was done exclusively with just pen and paper now has taken the form of something so much more complex and seemingly infinite. As a result of this, our reliance on physical text has transformed into an interest in something much less personal, adding further to the convenience and appeal that books offered. Into the Electronic Millennium by Sven Birkerts dives into this idea head on,

In her essay, “The Story of Stuff: Electronics”, Annie Leonard discusses certain technology manufacturing processes, and the growing ecological problems of technological “e-waste” that they cause.

People Need to Recycle In the United Sates, where the population is inflated every year. The amount of space for landfills decreases every day. The need for recycling should not be asked, it should just be done out of habit. Everyone in America needs to recycle, to help the lamdfill problem, help the environment, and help produce new products from recycled goods. In America there is about two-hundred and eight tons of residential and commercial trash generated a year, 4.3 pounds per person a day (Prichard 1A). This is an overwhelming amount of trashed produced yearly. When people recycle this number can be drastically cut. But many people do not practice and use

It is estimated that e-waste constitutes five percent of municipal solid waste and is expected to continuously rise. E-waste does not breakdown and stockpiling in landfill runs the great risk of toxic leaching into surrounding soils and in the case of an unlined landfill, possibly also into ground water. A steady build up of toxics has potential to cause significant environmental harm. However, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology, despite Australia being one of the most highly regulated areas of environmental control in Australia, there is no actual formal analysis on the activities of waste disposal and illegal polluting (Bricknell 2010). The lack of available statistics regarding illegal dumping can be explained by the tendency to regard the problem as non criminal.

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage to deliver a candid commencement speech at Stanford this past June, a plane flew over the stadium with a banner that read: "Steve -- don't be a mini player -- recycle all e-waste."