“Reuse, we are told, is as green a virtue as recycling. But with e-waste all the old ecological dogmas start to become ambiguous. Cellphones represent only a part of the world’s e-waste problem. But they are a key to understanding how complicated it is. They also embody the kind of high-tech products that we will be throwing away more of: easier to upgrade than repair, increasingly disposable-seeming but also deeply personal. As governments around the world, from the European Union to New York City, propose or pass laws to require the recycling of e-waste, there’s little consensus about what recycling actually means. No matter how close our relationship with our phones has become — how faithfully we keep them with us, how we hold them to our faces and whisper into them — we rarely wonder where they go when they die.”
Link: The Afterlife of Cellphones (nytimes.com)
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