Modern Day Landfills: Where Did All the Trash go?

By Ana Velasquez November, 21st 2024 

We can all say getting a new phone is very exciting. The feeling of something new in our hands for the holidays or after getting tired of the same old phone for years. Apple, one of the most innovative and modern tech companies, never disappoints consumers with upgrades coming with each new phone. Either with an upgraded camera quality, advance storage, “waterproof”, stronger screens, the layout being cutesier, whatever it is apple has been coming out with new phones every year since 2007, but is it really necessary? 

 Overconsumption is one of the biggest problems coming up and companies are encouraging it more and more each year releasing unnecessary updates to every phone. Customers complain about phone companies charging more money for a simple button added on to a new colored phone. But we also must keep ourselves accountable with what and how much we are buying, and how we are discarding old things. 

Apple makes around 500,000 phones every day and records show over millions of phones are being thrown away each year. This is becoming a fast-growing economic problem with how many hazardous features they have, including releasing toxic fumes into the air and putting animals in danger if they come across old phones, possibly mistaking them for food. 

We should be recycling our old phones instead of just throwing them away. You could also sell your phone-to-phone resellers, since they usually rebuild other electronics using scraps and they recycle the rest of the phone for other problems. You could also trade in your phone at all the electronic stores, giving you money to use for a new phone. 

Don’t let the latest iPhone release keep you from thinking about the ecosystems outside of humans that are suffering enough with the blind destruction humans are causing little by little. Make sure to recycle everything you can to help our changing world and the organisms depending on it.