5 Byproducts of Modern Life That Are Burying Us in Garbage

5 Your Old Cellphone Is Murdering the Third World

Americans replace their phones every 18 months. Europeans upgrade almost annually. And neither of them holds a candle to Japan, where it takes just nine months for a person to deem their handheld supercomputer so arcane and primitive that it may as well have a cord and a crank start. Similar stats exist for laptops and tablets, which is great news for the companies literally telling us to destroy our phones and laptops so we can justify buying shinier ones to play the exact same game of Candy Crush. But you know who doesn't think it's such great news? Mother Nature and her unpoisoned body.

This year, the number of cellphones in use will likely exceed the number of people on Earth, which is ... weird, right? Are there mole people with cell reception? Regardless, this means that pretty soon there will be more discarded cellphones than there are people on this planet -- and guess where most of them will go. Now, if it were just a question of having to wade through a sea of discarded Motorola Razrs to get to work, that would be one thing, but the physical size of these gadgets is dwarfed by the density of the harmful crap they contain. Contrary to popular belief, these magical little boxes don't actually run on fairy dust; a toxic metal cocktail fuels all that Snapchatting and Instagramming. And when old electronics aren't properly recycled, they tend to leak those hazardous guts into our soil and water. In China, improper disposal of handheld electronics has already tainted countless tons of rice with cadmium, chronic exposure to which causes kidney, liver, and lung failure. And cancer. And osteoporosis. The list goes on and on, and sadly not one item on it is a superpower.

The impact of trashing a device doesn't stop at pollution, because as soon as we commit those scarce metals to the landfill, more will have to be mined in order to make new iPhones -- and the mining process for one of the rarest elements found in almost every electronic device has created a real-life sequel to Blood Diamond. Coltan extraction has destroyed large tracts of Congo's rain forests and fueled rebel groups, killing millions of Congolese in the process. And thanks to the ad hoc nature of coltan mining, it's hard as hell to determine where exactly the stuff is coming from.

Apparently, strip mining African rain forests for rare metals to produce high-margin consumer electronics with a life cycle of less than a year and a half isn't a sustainable model. Who knew, right?

4 Face Wash Microbeads Are Becoming Toxic Sand

Hey, ladies: You know those microbeads in your face wash? Those tiny dots that the cosmetics companies say agitate the dermoplexus to stimulate maximum elastorque or whatever? Yeah, those things are pretty great. Probably. We don't know -- the closest thing to a cosmetic product we have is that wad of toilet paper we use to wipe spray cheese off of our faces. We only know that microbeads are made of plain old plastic, and they wreak absolute havoc on marine life.

You see, your drain is just the beginning of a very long journey for those tiny spheres of petroleum byproduct. From there, they find their way to your local water treatment plant and pass right through it (remember: microbeads), eventually settling in a lake or an ocean, where they leech pollutants from the water. In 2012, a research group found that the Great Lakes were absolutely filthy with the things, containing up to 1.7 million tiny plastic bits per square mile.

"But wait," you say, "isn't leeching pollutants a good thing?" Well, it might be, if we could somehow retrieve all the beads and dispose of them, but that's simply inconceivable, seeing as how these things are so small, they're practically invisible (why do you keep forgetting? Microbeads). So once they're full of shitty chemicals, they settle on the bottom and act all fish-egg-like, enticing marine animals to eat them.

So the chemicals end up in the beads, the beads end up in whatever eats them, and whatever eats them basically just lives with that mistake until their bodies can rectify that problem and eject the intruders. You know, basically the same thing you do after eating at Sizzler. Except that, unlike you, it's not over for the critters after a mere night of bargaining on the toilet with an uncaring god: A study found that it takes mussels 48 days to crap out the microplastics.

It's gotten so bad that even the folks profiting from microbeads have realized the problem: Some of the bigger manufacturers have vowed to discontinue the use of microplastics by 2017. So you'd better stock up now, womenfolk and beautiful men: After 2017, who the hell knows what will agitate your dermoplexus? Robots, probably. With their uncaring claws.

3 There's a Looming Piano Crisis

Home entertainment is an ever-evolving beast. Reading gave way to radio, which in turn gave way to television, which in turn gave way to the Internet, which will in turn someday give way to 4D Immersive DongVision (it's coming, people, in every sense of the word). But before any of that electrical wonderment came sizzling along, there was the piano.

A little less than a century ago, having a piano in your home was akin to having the latest console. The rise of mass production meant that even those who normally couldn't have afforded such a luxury delivered to them on the backs of Dickensian orphans could still cull their very own piano from the herd of cookie-cutter instruments. The problem is that these new, cheaper pianos were never meant to last forever.

Today, everybody and their grandmothers (mostly the grandmothers) has a piano sitting under an inch-thick layer of dust that's simply not worth restoring -- especially not when you consider the fact that you could purchase a nice newfangled electronic keyboard for way less than the average cost of a piano restoration. Much like their owners, as the years progress, these mass-produced pianos will succumb to old age. What are you supposed to do with a giant pile of wood and metal that you can't even give away for free on Craigslist?

Well ... you dump it, of course. You push it to the curb and hope your garbage man is feeling strangely generous today; you slip it into an alleyway where it will function as a condo for plague mice; or, if you have a serious lack of concern for your own life and limb, you bust that big mofo down into easier-to-manage scrap. But that last option is difficult, namely because the incredible tension on the piano wires transforms the instrument into a flailing death-metal booby trap that can take even an expert the better part of a day to properly dismantle.

And so the age-old tradition of offloading unwanted pianos by selling or gifting has been phased out. Now we just pile them up by the truckload and drive them off to the exotic land of Not My ProblemVille.

2 New TVs Are Creating a Lead TV Tube Overflow

Televisions used to be like assholes: everyone had one. But then we decided, hey, why stop at one asshole? We aren't limited by stupid short-sighted biology here: TVs ahoy! There's a TV in the bedroom. And in the kitchen. And why the hell shouldn't we be able to see The Walking Dead while camped out on the shitter? What is this, communist Russia?

So there we all were: 20 TVs bathing us from all sides in their healthy, vitamin-D providing cathode glow, only to find that cathodes are suddenly outdated. LEDs, LCDs, plasmas, 3D, 4K -- we burned through the kid's college fund just trying to keep up with TV obsolescence. And all those old ones have to go somewhere.

Between 1980 and 2008, over 700 million tube TVs were sold in the U.S. alone. While new versions of these old-fashioned TVs were still being manufactured, many firms did a tidy business recycling and reselling the lead glass that went into them. Of course, now that the world has moved on to thinner screens, the market for toxic glass has dried right up, and recycling companies are left holding a poison-laced hot potato with no way to recoup the costs associated with detoxifying it. We're talking stories-high mountains of lead that we don't really know what to do with. The landfill isn't an option anymore -- there's only so much lead you can shove into the ground before a nature spirit manifests to fight your bulldozer, and then you've got to deal with the Captain Planet kids all up in your grill. It's a whole thing.

But once we figure out this whole tube business, that will be the end of it, right? Of course not! Because the LCDs most consumers replaced their tube TVs with are perfect examples of how to build something cheaply yet outrageously toxic and damn nigh impossible to recycle. So, while we staved off burial under a pile of Sony WEGAs by recycling their old tubes into new TVs for decades, there won't be any such grace period with LCDs -- once an LCD screen gives up the ghost, you're left with a big ol' rectangle of toxic garbage. But still -- look how thin it is!

1 Flushable Butt Wipes Are Causing Shit Geysers

If there's one thing that we at Cracked are for, it's cleaner butts. If somebody were to found the Cleaner Butts Party and run for president on the "shine up your pooper" platform, well, we'd vote for him in a heartbeat. Mostly because the two-party system is broken, so who gives a shit?

Hey -- there's his campaign slogan!

So we're pretty on board with the idea of flushable butt wipes. But the problem is that there is the very real possibility that they will drown the world in shit. We previously covered the time London's underground was invaded by a poo-based version of the Blob that damn near turned every manhole cover in the area into a geyser of feces:

And guess what held that whole thing together? Yes, the spirit of community. And also flushable wipes. The aptly named "Fatberg" (soon to be a Tyler Perry project) is just one of many disgusting incidents caused by the current popularity of disposable ass wipes. They're also causing sewers to overflow into bodies of water like creeks and rivers, meaning that you could wind up swimming in the very poo you so diligently cleaned off. As a result, sanitation companies have been forced to spend millions to implement new machinery that can grind the wipes down into something that's actually ... well, flushable.

Due to the massive increase of these overflow incidents, entire work crews that were previously on call for other sewer emergencies have been instead placed on "wipes patrol" -- just standing by, ready to unclog pipes and machinery that aren't built to handle anything more substantial than toilet paper.

So here's to you, the real unsung heroes -- the thin brown line that stands between us and a quicksand trap of our own feces. May God bless your health and service, Wipes Patrol.

Eric Yosomono lives and writes about wasting away in Japan, and you can read about it at Gaijinass.com. J. is working on a book. You can help start a bidding war here.

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Related Reading: Hey, not everything we do is wasteful. Human semen makes a great beauty treatment. We guess that's somewhat negated by the fact that the army shot toxic waste barrels to make them go away. But of course, there's no greater resource you can waste than your time.