Most American's are naive to the impact our consumerism has on a global scale.  Our Nike shoes are made by horribly underpaid Asian workers of different nationalities, our household appliances produced in Chinese factories that pump out an incredible amount of air pollution creating a smog that lingers over Chinese cities and pollutes the lungs of millions of people, and our e-waste is shipped overseas to be dealt with by the youth of foreign countries so that that adults of this country don't have to deal with it.

     Though all of these are major issues, the focus of this weblog is e-waste.  According to www.greenpeace.org:

"In the United States, it is estimated that 50-80 percent of the waste collected for recycling is being exported.  This practice is legal because the US has not ratified the Basel Convention.  Mainland China tried to prevent this trade by banning the import of e-waste in 2000. However, we have discovered that the laws are not working; e-waste is still arriving in Guiya of Guangdong Province, the main centre of e-waste scrapping in China....  In India, 25,000 workers are employed at scrap yards in Delhi alone, where 10-20,000 tons of e-waste is handled each year, 25 percent of this being computers."

     These statistics are staggering, and though efforts have been made by China to reduce the amount of e-waste entering their country e-waste is still being imported.  This is another symptom of the problem.  E-waste sites are far too profitable for them to be abolished completely through statutes.  The only solution is to find a profitable way to safely recycle these materials in an eco-friendly way, something that is much easier said than done.