Nothing stings quite like losing a perfectly good iPhone to water damage. Luckily, Apple has delivered some good news to anyone prone to a case of the butterfingers: the new iPhone 7 is water-resistant. It’s worth mentioning that Samsung, Motorola and other companies have long offered water-proof phones. But the popularity of the iPhone could make the feature have a significant impact.
Unveiled Wednesday, the iPhone’s water resistant feature doesn’t just benefit consumers. It also could help combat e-waste: the environmental hazards created by discarded electronics.
Americans discarded about 2.37 million tons of electronic waste — TVs, computers, cell phones, printers, scanners, and faxes — in 2009, according to the EPA.
In recent years, the U.S. has shipped massive amounts of these discarded electronics to Third World countries such as India, China, and South Africa, reporter Andrew J. Hawkins explains on the Verge.
“Exported e-waste has turned rivers in China black and towns in Ghana into some of the world’s largest dumps,” Hawkins writes.
In May, the Basil Action Network published a report on a two-year study that used GPS devices to track electronic waste left at American recycling sites.
Sixty-five out of the 200 devices BAN followed were shipped overseas and often ended up in Asia, and were believed to be shipped illegally, BAN reported. And those were just electronics people intended to recycle — about 75 percent of e-waste is amassed in landfills, the EPA reports.
To read the full story, visit http://www.attn.com/stories/11219/water-resistant-iphone-7-could-combat-e-waste.