Electronic Wasteland

We all know the feeling. When our recycling bin is sitting out next to the garbage and we get home, what proof do we really have that the recycling is making it to its proper disposal facility.

But our E-Waste? Where does it really go? With over 100,000,000 million cell phones being thrown away in the US per year, and we haven't seen stockpiles of them while driving through the central plains, it makes you wonder what happens to a lot of this stuff.

We all hope that when we do our part, the recyclers are doing theirs and not simply green washing us. This video from 60 minutes is worth the watch.

From all of the reading I have done, this really became an issue to the Government Accountability Office in 2003. Since then, there have been mulitple investigations into what is actually happening to our E-Waste. According to many sources out there, the EPA is fully aware of it, but for some reason, don't bother because it isn't an issue in the United States.

My concerns: If we were to just stop shipping all E-Waste, what would the back up really look like? Unfortunately, we might need to actually see this large amount of electronic waste in order to start a change. How bad does it have to get before we actually do something?