dusk pictures

the moon


at the corner of coitus and panhandle





-notes
"By 2009, the FCC [the U.S. Federal Communications Commission] will have mandated the complete change from analog to digital television. All the older TVs have cathode-ray tubes that contain maybe five to 10 pounds of lead. Television enjoys a 95 per cent market penetration in the United States, which would mean that, conservatively, there are about 300 million of them out there in living rooms and dens and basements. And they are about to be chucked. The sheer amount of toxic lead that is about to enter the waste stream is simply going to overwhelm it -- there are not enough container ships to send these obsolete televisions off to Asia where they can be broken up safely. This is a massive biohazard that is about to enter America's groundwater. And it is going to happen because electronic manufacturers lobbied the FCC to mandate digital TV. The problem for them was, there is not enough obsolescence in the television market; they are built to last five to seven years. That was too long."

-the amount of toxins that go into an iPod is enormous. There are more than 68 million of these things out there, and they are full of cadmium, beryllium and lead. And Apple has deliberately created them so they only last a year. The company has a voluntary take-back program, but how many people use it?

-Cellphones are now deliberately underbuilt: They are so closely linked to style and fashion, that manufacturers realize people want to trade them in after a year or so, and so they make them to break.

-We have become creatures of conscious self-display. You are what you drive or wear. You are the model Blackberry that you use.

(http://thetyee.ca/Books/2006/08/01/MadeToBreak/)

-2002 Huge quantities of hazardous electronic wastes are being exported to China, Pakistan and India ...