Huxley may or may not be right that we’ll entertain ourselves to death, but the shift to digital TVs is going to create an e-waste clusterfrak that will likely accelerate toxic waste into the food stream. No decision is innocent anymore.
Living Green Magazine – Combatting the E-Waste Deluge By Andrew Korfhage:
The worse news is that while our lawmakers should be figuring out ways to reverse this trend, they’ve actually passed legislation that will accelerate it. Congress passed legislation last year shifting the nation’s television signals from analog to digital without any requirement to recycle the millions of analog TV sets that will be made obsolete by the switch.
Electronics companies (whose lobbyists argued in favor of the switch) will see increased sales, when up to 20 percent of analog-only households see their screens go dark in February 2009. Congress should have coupled the switch with a requirement for manufacturers to responsibly recycle their products – not just abandon the useless sets to landfills.
Not to worry (too much), though. Living Green points out that Sony has a TV recycling program, or you could get a converter box and save your old TV. Either way, watching TV has ceased to be an environmentally neutral activity (as if it ever were).
