Yesterday, Network World published a follow-up article to the Government Accountability Office’s report on electronics recycling and disposal of “e-waste.” Not worth reading if you don’t have the time (or just dedicate yourself to following even more depressing ecological/economic exploits transpiring the world over), but the report brings up some interesting points that make me a tad curious if my annual effort to collect and recycle personal electronics (cell phones, batteries, monitors, etc.) through various corporate-sponsored, city-wide events is nothing more than an indirect method of relocating my shit to uglier, more troubled parts of the world.

While I perhaps was naive in assuming that the recycling process was performed by dudes wearing lab coats [and listening to Kraftwerk] — and that’s an image I’ve never actually fully had, thanks to the internet, reading, and the works of artists like Edward Burtynsky (whose images of e-waste dumps in Chinese villages are beyond words) — I’d atleast suspended my own frighteningly vivid skepticism for long enough to amass a pile of monitors, dead computer components, cell phones, and batteries in my Brooklyn basement in anticipation of moments affording ecologically responsible disposal.

The article goes on to state that a good bulk of these “recycled electronics” from various sources end-up in China and India — contrary to the aforementioned naive, Kraftwerk-and-lab-coat-filled vision — where devices meet hazardous, open-air incineration or acid baths (to strip precious metals from circuitry). Mixed loads of working and non-working electronics alike are also reported to be dumped indiscriminately in Africa for scavengers to pick apart. Naturally the EPA turns a blind eye to these activities.

Is this forming a rich tapestry of post-apocalyptic landscape visions for anyone else? Fucking hell!