If you’re a good person(TM), you’ve probably taken your broken or unwanted electronics to an e-waste disposal site. Maybe a friendly Staples employee promised to recycle your laptop or phone safely, so toxic materials don’t end up in your city’s landfills. But the new Netflix documentary, Buy now: the shopping conspiracy,– which began streaming today – exposes what actually happens to many of these so-called recycled electronics: They are shipped overseas so poorer countries can take care of them.

Written and directed by Nic Stacey, Buy now is a stinging indictment against modern consumerism and waste. Not only is the production of human waste reaching an unprecedented level, but the waste we produce is increasingly toxic. This is due to the rise of personal electronic devices, made from hazardous materials including mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium and other toxins, all of which can cause serious health problems if used. ‘exposure. Yet every day, people in developing countries receive so-called recycled electronic devices from the West and collect them to make parts while wearing little or no protective equipment.

For this section of the film, Stacey features Jim Puckett, the founder of a non-profit organization fighting to reduce toxic waste, called Basel Action Network. But in Buy nowPuckett is identified as a “waste investigator.” It’s easy to see why: he and his team install trackers in old electronic devices, take them to waste disposal facilities, and track where the e-waste ends up.

“Right now, we’re tracking about 400 devices,” Puckett says in his interview with the talking head. “We like to use LCD flat panel monitors. We’ll put the track in a place like here, put it back together and deliver it to a so-called recycler. And then we see what actually happens.

Puckett shows off a tracker he tracked from a recycling center in Dresden, Germany, where it was sent to Antwerp, Belgium, and then eventually to Thailand. Although it’s supposedly illegal to ship this type of e-waste overseas, Puckett says exporters can easily bypass customs by pinning a nice hundred-dollar bill in shipping containers. When several of their trackers ended up in the city of Pattaya, Thailand, Puckett paid a visit there.

“When I arrived, I found a terrible scene,” Puckett says in the film. The workers broke all of this by hand, releasing a lot of very toxic substances.

In other words, taking your toxic e-waste to a recycling facility is often just a roundabout way of disposing of your hazardous waste in a developing country.

“The reason this is moving across the planet is to take advantage, to exploit, a weaker economy to do something that, strictly speaking, would be very expensive,” Puckett says. “They make someone else pay, but they don’t pay with money, they pay with their health. Ingredients in electronic products include heavy metals, cadmium, lead, mercury, and brominated flame retardants, which can cause all sorts of problems from cancer and reproductive harm. These things aren’t just trash. These things are hazardous waste.

So what can you do instead? The film’s obligatory call to action suggests keeping your electronics as long as possible or giving back what you no longer want. If possible, try to repair your broken devices before choosing to throw them away. (Or, if you’re like me, just keep all your old laptops and phones in a box in your closet indefinitely.) Of course, Apple and other tech companies don’t make it easy — in fact, they encourage the opposite .

As Nirav Patel, current CEO of Framework and former software development engineer at Apple, says in the film: “From my personal experience, if you’re a designer or engineer at one of these companies, waste doesn’t come into play. never taken into account. There’s no meeting at a company that builds a laptop or phone or other device to say, “Let’s talk about what happens at the end of life.” »

The real change would come from these companies changing their design approach to take into account the end of life of electronic products. For this to happen, government regulations would need to be created and enforced. In the meantime, you can do your part by simply buying less.