Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 128

billion pounds of lead, 3 million pounds of cadmium, almost 2 million
pounds of chromium, and 632,000 pounds of mercury, as well as many
other dangerous and carcinogenic chemicals, like beryllium and gallium
arsenide (Maxwell and Miller 2012a).
E-waste has been described as a “growing toxic nightmare” and with
good reason. As Leyla Acaroglu describes it,
In far-lung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana;
Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant
mountains and burn it so they can extract the metals—copper wires,
gold and silver threads—inside, which they sell to recycling merchants
for only a few dollars. In India, young boys smash computer batteries
with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic lecks of which cover their
hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths
of hot lead, “cooking” circuit boards so they can remove slivers of
gold inside. . . . Most scientists agree that exposure poses serious health
risks, especially to pregnant women and children. (2013)
From their earliest days, one major argument made about computers
has been that they provide an environmentally sound alternative to the
productive engines of the industrial era. Scholars, including most who are
otherwise critical about information technology, have generally ignored
their impact. Moreover, as Maxwell and Miller (2012a, 13) note in one of
the few sustained accounts of the environmental problems associated with
media technology, well-regarded academics who are quick to point out the
excellent use environmentalists make of new media have nothing to say
about the profound irony of this activity. At best, research advances the
view well stated in a 1998 article by a trio of scholars who, in the irst wave
of the Internet's growth, sought to understand the relationship between
environmentalism and the information society: “On the one hand, there
is the potential for reducing the stress on the environment: the emergence
of information technologies and services can lead to a dematerialisation
of production and immaterialisation of consumption” (Jokinen, Malaska,
and Kaivo-oja 1998). This puts succinctly the promise of IT to promote
a more sustainable world. Computers linked to communication systems
can create smarter systems of production that require less material input
and create less material waste. Just as important, the process of getting