Americans alone throw away an average
of 150 million cellphones a year. Almost none of the people that
are throwing them know where their cellphones going when their put
into their garbage. They don't know that these phones can kill a
child or even a pregnant woman in Ghana, India, and/or China. I
didn't know either, and that's why I am writing this piece. People
in the US and many other places need to be informed of this problem
and act on it.
While children in the United States of
America go to school daily, children in the countries listed above
are working long hours extracting metal out of electronics. The
children in China and the other countries are quite poor and need the
copper, gold, and silver that is in your cellphone, even if it only
sells for a few dollars. Boys in India sit in toxic flakes of
cadmium while recovering this same thing from the inside if
batteries. They must use mallets that could potentially hurt them.
I don't believe that this is right. All children, internationally,
should be getting an education. Women should be doing a job that
doesn't hurt them, rather than sitting over a boiling pot of led,
which is toxic, extracting gold from circuit boards.
The article states that scientists
agree that it is quite dangerous to people's health and that a low
level of a toxic chemical can stop a child's growth or cause
neurological damage. The US needs to act further on the Responsible
Electronics Recycling Act, which would make it illegal for toxic
waste to be exported to countries with very few or no safeguard. The
Basel Convention is a similar treaty that makes it illegal to export
toxic waste of any kind. The US is the only country that has yet to
sign. I think that we need to think about others and stop being so
selfish as a country. The children in China, India, and Ghana matter
just as much as us.
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