Annie Leonard's 'The Story of Electronics' - Design for the Dump

If you haven't checked out "The Story of Stuff" and "The Story of Bottled Water" (among other 'Stories'), creator Annie Leonard has a great new short film about "The Story of Electronics."  Sustainability advocate Annie Leonard has spent nearly two decades investigating and organizing on environmental health and justice issues. Annie has been named a Time Magazine Environmental Hero, and her film The Story of Stuff has been viewed over 12 million times. She is fiercely dedicated to reclaiming and transforming our industrial and economic systems so they serve, rather than undermine, ecological sustainability and social equity.

GoLocal member Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy brought Annie here to Sonoma County on November 13 for their Leadership in Sustainability Awards, and if you missed that event, we'd like to at least share a bit about The Story of Electronics. 

Designing for the dump, she says, is the "key strategy of the companies that make our electronics." The more crap we have to throw away because it breaks or we have to upgrade, the more crap they can sell us.  Pretty simple strategy, but that means that designers of electronics are building products that are "hard to upgrade, easy to break and impractical to repair," and Leonard points out it's usually cheaper to buy a new DVD player than to try to get a broken one repaired. And "that's not just a pain in the wallet -- they're causing a global toxic emergency," she says.

The film shows the life-cycle of our electronics, which usually includes a fair bit of toxins on the input side, much of which will end up leaching out when those electronics are tossed. And old TV she says, contains 5 pounds of lead.  Instead she advises that we build products that are longer lasting, less toxic and more recyclable and we protect and strengthen take back laws and stop shipping our e-waste to developing countries. Check out the video and learn what we can do to cut down our e-waste and design better products.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW_7i6T_H78&feature=player_embedded#!