What a Waste: Billions of External Power Supplies Sitting in Landfills

Seattle artist and former corporate lawyer Chris Jordan has taken it upon himself to create art in images that make it easy to visualize and understand the aftermath of our consumer culture.  Chris recently spoke  here in San Francisco.

I wish I had the chance to thank him personally for taking this photograph at a dump in Atlanta. To me, it is the most powerful way to convey the wastefulness of the current method of powering consumer electronics. You can read more about his recent exhibit in San Francisco and see more of Chris' work, here.

The numbers are staggering: according to Gartner, this year 3.2 billion external power supplies will be  manufactured worldwide.  Meanwhile, approximately two billion of them will go into landfill. As our CEO Frank Paniagua pointed out, 379 million external power supplies will go in landfills in 2008 in the U.S. alone. As the number of cell phones, iPods, laptops and other consumer electronic products that are manufactured each year continues to grow, older models (and their external power supplies) will become obsolete, be discarded, and continue to threaten the future of our planet.