(I realized looking back that my Journal 7 was kind of abysmal and didn’t work with this project at all so I’m choosing a new community and tech to talk about and will be going back and changing my Journal 7 later to reflect that)

The community I chose to focus on was my home town of Situate, a small beach town in the south shore of Massachusetts, and the tech I said that benefited the town was the new middle school building with the state of the art touch screen boards and ipads for kids to rent out for academic use. The tech I said that was a drain on the community was plastic packaging as it can routinely cover our beaches which are a large part of our town’s image.

Plastics are made primarily from oil drilled from either parts of the US, over in the Middle East, or other parts of the world and are refined into polymer pellets then melted and molded into plastics. The drilling of oil, the refining process, and the eventual incineration of it (17% of plastic in the US ends in the incinerator) all contribute massively to carbon emissions and climate change. With less than 10% of plastics in the US being recycled that means more and more needs to keep being made since the rest is either being burnt up, going into landfills, or into the ocean where it harms the wildlife and dirties the beaches of places like my hometown. This doesn’t even get into the nasty business that is the oil trade, and how the reliance on this substance has turned the middle east into a dangerous political battle ground on the world stage.

Ipads may help my home town’s education system by giving students access to the internet and online programs they might not be able to otherwise due to financial issues, but as we learned in class about the making of the product’s sibling the Iphone, this production comes at a hell of a cost. Rare metals mined in volatile places like Africa that damage the environment and sow violence in weakened societies dependent on the money this trade brings them. But beyond the simple toll of the Ipad’s components, the Ipad needs to be assembled, and assembled it is in China with a workforce in terrible conditions. For example, the company Foxconn technology assembles a vast amount of daily electronic products and by the accounts of workers, had forced extremely long shifts with little breaks, terribly cramped living conditions, and a hostile work environment that threatened any kindof slacking off with being fired.

However those costs have the “benefit” of being paid by other people, on the opposite side of the world. But those costs feels far higher if they were right in our backyard. If that oil for the plastic was drilled in my backyard, If all the oil of the Middle East was actually underneath New England I can only imagine how different the world around it might be. Would it bring in wealth to the community? Or would that wealth just go up into the pockets of the land owners? Would the stability of this part of the world have been shattered long ago? I would never know but imagining I can’t think of it being a particularly good timeline to be apart of. If the mines for rare earths and other precious minerals were under my feet and not those in Africa and South East Asia it could probably bring in tons of jobs for the people of Scituate and the surrounding towns, but at what cost? The environment around me? And don’t even get started on that factory. An Ipad would weigh far heavier in all of our hands if the people we knew and loved had to work in conditions like that to make it and the thousands of identical copies spread throughout the first world.

In the end this all comes back to the question posed in our Journal last week. How do we decide what is and isn’t worth the cost? It’s pretty easy to say no more ipads or no more plastic, but their benefits are annoyingly hard to shake. Like I said earlier, Ipads bought en masse by schools help financially disadvantaged students keep up in the ever growing tech environments of education, as well as it’s uses as a camera/gaming platform/etc. that makes it an attractive purchase for those in the first world. And plastic packaging does help keep food safe from bacteria, as well as manage to take up less space then other forms of packaging.

In order to force positive change in a situation like this that breeds moral apathy towards externalized costs, strong government regulation must be put in place to force companies like Apple to find producers who will respect the health and working environments of workers to produce their products, as well as quotas to how much of products with largely recycle-ability, like the Ipad and plastics, are actually recycled. Apple is already working to make the pipeline of old products recycled into new ones a constant presence in the industry, and the government should be there to help it along as best it can. Lastly, it must be up to the worker to decide, on their terms, how production is handled and factory environments are managed. However how that could be established, with companies getting their assembled products from over seas, eludes me.

Sources:

In China, Human Costs are Built Into an Ipad: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html

How Plastic is Made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4VG-7ZFvDM

EPA facts and figures about material waste recycling: https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/containers-and-packaging-product-specific-data

Three Ways Your Smart Phone Can Harm the Environment: http://theconversation.com/three-ways-making-a-smartphone-can-harm-the-environment-102148