i came across this article on degradable refuse, by Victor Rozek in the site http://www.indiamike.com/india/chai-and-chat-f73/the-plastic-sea-t25534/. for anybody really concerned with the growing environmental issue, this is an ideal site to share your views.

a small excerpt is given here:

"Imagine you are looking at a little girl playing with a keyboard. What do you see? Is she in a classroom watching bright software-generated images dancing to the touch of her fingers? Or is she home at a small computer desk tucked under the windows of her pastel room? What is she doing?

Look closely and you will see that the child is dirty and her eyes have a look of resigned boredom.We do not know who she is, but we do know something of her life. She is Chinese. She lives in a village called Guiyu in Guangdong Province. If someone in her family had a car, she could travel to Hong Kong in just four hours. But for her, the distance is galactic. She will never climb the glass and steel peaks of the Hong Kong skyline. Her mountain is made of computer parts: an alp of American electronic refuse that rises in irregular contours above her village. She sits atop it, aimlessly fingering a keyboard. To her left runs the Lianjiang River. Its waters no longer sustain life; they poison it. To her right, her father, and thousands like him, swings an ancient hammer, dismantling screens, printers, CPUs, looking for the mineral caches within. The broken plastic is tossed into a burning pyre that fills the air with black, acrid smoke thick enough to thwart the sunlight. Through the haze she can see bulldozers pushing mounds of broken components, toner cartridges, and the slurry from chemical extraction processes into the river.

This is what American authorities and computer manufacturers call "recycling." It is perhaps an inevitable, if unintended, consequence of our appetite for computers and related electronic gadgets. Their strategic obsolescence has created a massive disposal problem that grows with each generation of machines. In 1994 an estimated 10 million systems annually found their way into the nation's landfills. Today, that number approaches 40 million.

It further states:

California and Massachusetts, states with large populations and concentrations of high-tech industries, became concerned about ground water and soil contamination. They passed laws preventing the wholesale dumping of computers and electronic components. At least 20 other states are poised to follow.

In response, a number of computer recycling companies emerged to process the astonishing quantities of e-waste. Everyone felt better, but few actually understood the workings of the "recycling" operation or had anything but a theoretical grasp of the unmanageable volume of materials that continued flooding into the pipeline.

The reality was that 50 to 80 percent of the electronic equipment was never recycled at all, but loaded onto ships destined to be dumped in some desperately poor nation. Officials in target nations like China, India, and Pakistan either didn't fully comprehend the toxic nature of the materials they were accepting or, more likely, were paid not to object. ...."

isn't this real scary? think about it. do visit the above link if you want to know more of it, or if you want to air your views. they have a discssion forum open.