Disposing with Disposability

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Are you optimistic about the future? Do you think we'll get our act together?

I think we're in for a really hard patch. We tend to manage things on a crisis basis, so I imagine there has to be one before there will be the public will to at least slow down the kind of excessive waste we have. You mentioned that in 2009 all the analog TVs will go belly up. With 5-10 pounds of lead per TV, and an estimated 300 million TVs -- I think the number is substantially larger, but even if it's only 300 million TVs -- that's a lot of lead. As they're sitting in dumps, lead is coming out of them, and so are flame retardants and other [toxins].

We've confronted ourselves with this really overwhelming problem and I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. When municipalities and states start realizing how much it's costing them to process the junk that's put into the market and what it's doing to the infrastructure in their state -- how they can't afford other [public services], how it's going to impact the health of their workers, how it's going to impact the water quality for their industries -- they'll see all the additional costs. I think at that point people are going to start screaming and making the manufacturers pay.

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