- What up, world.

Journalist Myles Bess here and we've got a E-waste problem, y'all.

Look at this.

You got a old laptop, a coffee maker, a flamingo lamp?

Oh lord, curling iron.

What's going on here?

- [Friend] Oh, that's a phone I dropped in the toilet.

- Okay.

Did you try to get it fixed?

- [Friend] I just got a new one.

- Of course you did.

You see, that, that right there is what I'm talking about.

Just in 2019 alone, Americans generated about seven million tons of E-waste.

That's about 46 pounds per person.

So today, we're exploring what actually happens to all our E-waste.

(record scratching) Now, when I say E-waste, I'm talking anything with a plug or battery.

According to one estimate, about half of all E-waste is personal devices that we just can't live without.

Computers, smartphones, tablets, TVs, and small equipment like, you know, coffee makers.

And to clarify, this E-waste problem isn't just a US problem.

It's a global issue.

Between 2010 and 2019, global E-waste went from 33.8 million metric tons to 53.6 million metric tons.

That's almost the equivalent of 4,500 Eiffel Towers.

I'm talking if you put those all in one space, that'd cover the area the size of Manhattan.

And the US and Europe contribute to almost half of the E-waste generated each year.

Honestly, it's not all that surprising.

Y'all, we go crazy for new tech.

Apple came out with the first iPhone in 2007, sold over a million of them in the first three months, and then they just kept releasing different versions every year.

And other tech companies got in on that action.

Now, the average American gets a new phone every 18 months, which means about 100 to 120 million phones are tossed each year.

But don't go thinking it's just a consumer problem.

Companies also purposely design products to not last as long or to be harder to repair.

So you're forced to buy stuff instead of, you know, fixing the broken thing.

There's actually a term for this.

It's called planned obsolescence.

And there's several ways companies use legit tricky tactics to do this, like having copyrighted software of digital locks so third parties can't fix stuff.

Like, Apple was infamous for doing this back in 2016 when it just straight up bricked people's phones if it had detected that it was repaired by an unauthorized repair tech.

People freaked out and Apple eventually apologized and released a fix.

Another thing companies will do is they'll pair different parts together so that if something breaks, you simply can't just replace one part.

All kinds of companies do this.

I'm talking tractors, TVs, video game consoles, food processors, cars, you name it.

And then companies will also straight up refuse to sell replacement parts or operating manuals to fix things or they'll just glue parts together instead of using screws, which makes it harder to take apart and repair.

And to make matters worse, a lot of this stuff is toxic.

I'm talking things like lead and mercury in circuit boards and brominated flame retardants in the plastics.

So, where does this all go?

Well, if it's not being stored in a closet or tossed in a landfill, it can actually end up being shipped around the world.

Check out this map that shows how rich countries end up dumping E-waste at these sites in developing countries, like this one in Ghana.

See that smoke?

Yeah, that's real toxic.

- We would see people burning the stuff, breathing in the toxic fumes, using really caustic acids to strip out precious metals and discard the rest by just dumping it into the river.

- That's Jim Puckett.

His organization monitors the global trade of waste, including E-waste.

- But one place in Thailand, we call the dioxin factory because when you burn computer plastics, it's got all this bromine in it and chlorine in it.

When you burn that, you make dioxin, which is one of the most toxic substances.

And this is what this place did.

It basically just burned circuit boards day in and day out and it was in an agricultural region.

So all the fallout would go into the dairy farms and the other agricultural crops and people would be then eating that, putting in these toxins into the food chain.

- And chlorinated dioxins are as scary as they sound.

They can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones, and also, cause cancer.

Now this isn't supposed to happen.

Back in 1989, the UN created an international treaty which regulates the trade of toxic waste.

There are 190 parties to it, but the US never actually ratified it.

And despite its existence, as you can see, this trade is still happening.

And Jim's been working to stop it for a long time.

At first, he was doing it like the old school stakeout way where he'd watch E-waste being loaded into cargo containers on ships and then he'd tracked those containers online through the shipping companies.

- We would alert the authorities in the receiving country.

Hey, we got some electronic waste coming towards you.

It's illegal for your country to import that.

You might wanna take this off the ship and search it.

- And then about 15 years ago, they started using GPS trackers.

- We would put it inside old computers, inside monitors, inside printers, embed those trackers in this thing, make the thing totally dysfunctional so nobody could reuse it.

- [Myles] And then they bring it to an E-waste recycler and track where it goes.

- We were able to show that so much of this stuff, more than 20% was still going offshore.

And moreover, we were able to go right to the places it was ending up.

So we found about more than 20 so-called recyclers in Hong Kong.

And working with the Hong Kong press and the US press, we were able to shut that, those operations down.

- Jim says now a lot of that business has moved to other parts of the world in places like Southeast Asia.

- And this is happening still to this day, all over Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia.

- But the good news is, over time, Jim's seen the rate of exports from the US decrease from about 80% to 20%.

Not every E-waste recycler is shipping their stuff overseas.

- We had to create a market strategy, a certification so that we could direct consumers and businesses to use only the good recyclers that pledge not to export and we check them.

And this is the eStewards certified recyclers.

And we also put GPS trackers into their stream and make sure that they're not lying to us.

- And these types of responsible recyclers are a part of the solution to this massive E-waste problem.

- Last month, we took in 15 million pounds of electronic waste at our nine facilities across the United States.

- [Myles] ERI is an eSteward certified recycler and the largest recycler of electronic waste in the US.

They have the capacity to recycle more than a billion pounds of electronic devices annually.

- We commoditized a lot of those electronics, which means we put it through our proprietary shredders and turned it into commodities.

Steel, plastic, aluminum, copper, gold, lead, silver, and all those metals and the plastics were sold to smelters to go back into new products around the world.

- A circular economy is pretty much the opposite of designing things for the dump.

It's a more sustainable vision where instead of extracting raw materials from the earth, making something with it, and then throwing that thing away when you're done, you instead reuse and repurpose materials so you're not extracting so much from the planet and creating so much waste.

- Think about all the carbon emissions that you saved that we don't have to go dig for new aluminum because we can recycle old aluminum.

Same thing goes for gold and silver and lead and all these other metals, steel.

We can save so much energy, which saves so much carbon emissions, when we recycle these materials.

- When E-waste is just tossed or not handled properly, we're throwing out a lot of valuable stuff.

According to a World Economic Forum report, the material value alone is worth $62.5 billion, three times more than the annual output of the world's silver mines and more than the GDP of most countries.

There's 100 times more gold in a ton of mobile phones than in a ton of gold ore. That's a lot of gold!

So making sure your stuff ends up at an eStewards recycler is one thing you can do, but solving this global E-waste problem is gonna require multiple solutions.

And a lot of it comes down to the design of the product.

- They need to be designed, first of all, to be toxic free.

They need to be designed in a way that longevity's expected.

And one way to do that is to have, rather than owning your computer, to lease it.

And if you lease it from the company that makes it, they have an incentive to have it last for a really long time.

They have an incentive not to make it toxic 'cause they're gonna get that product.

It's theirs, they're just leasing it to you.

- This business model, electronics as a service, could potentially make it so that companies are the ones responsible for the waste they generate rather than leaving it to the hands of the consumers.

Come on, tech bros. Let's step up your game, you know, let's see if you can design the toxic stuff out of it.

I'm not a venture capitalist, but I am cute.

(bell ringing) But in the meantime, what can you do?

Maybe see if you can hold onto your stuff a little longer before buying something new or buy a refurbished phone or computer.

And if you're like us and you do have a pile of E-waste sitting in a box in your closet, take those things to an E-waste recycler.

Check out that eStewards website to find one near you.

And pro tip, Staples E-waste collection sites all use eStewards certified recyclers.

Hey, Staples, hit me up for a sponsorship.

I think we could do some things.

So, what do you all think?

Has watching this video changed the way you think about E-waste?

And for students in school, Jim says you should find out what they do with their old Chromebooks and tech.

- It's really worthwhile for people from the grassroots to say I wanna know where our school computers end up.

Whoever's gonna give them the best deal on recycling will often be who the schools use and those are often the worst.

So they're cutting corners to make the bids they make.

And very often, those corners that get cut are dumping things in developing countries.

If you wanna use some trackers, contact us 'cause we might be able to spare some of our trackers and you can put GPS trackers into things and put 'em into your school recycle program and see what happens.

As always, I'm your host, Myles Bess.

Peace out.

(inspiring music)