At the turn of the 20th century, major cities across the world were being quite literally buried in horse shit. Then along came a savior in the form of the automobile, but that prophet soon proved false when it ever so slowly suffocated us all with its foul, petroleum-induced flatulence. It seems that the never-ending cycle of human progress has a nasty side effect of constantly threatening to bury us all under a mountain of crap, and it's certainly not over yet ...

5 Your Old Cellphone Is Murdering the Third World

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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.

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"Oh please; like she wasn't full of magma and fire ants already."

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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.

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Unless you count moving at super-speed toward your own mortality.

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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.