Worldwide, 1.7 billion cell phones are sold worldwide. What you buy is much more than what is in your hands, you buy more effects. The model we have in our capitalist world is to sell you things, right? - E-waste or electronic waste is is a major global problem that grows every year. But fixing it will take more than just telling people not to upgrade their phones. Manufacturers have assured everyone that recycling is wrong, don't worry, buy it, just recycle it, not a problem and they basically design waste disposal items. To prevent toxic waste from accumulating millions of tons, our devices need to be reconstructed in order to be upgraded, easily repaired, and reusable. The question is, can we rebuild our devices so that we can be more sophisticated and more advanced in our world? Smartphones, computers, monitors, all the internet of things, when thrown out, become a waste and the world creates garbage with a shocking clip. - I can give you numbers but they are too big with stars they won't mean much. More than 50 million tons of production are produced annually and that is growing. - While most of us stop thinking about our smartphones at a time when the battery is delivering, Jim Puckett founder of the Basel Action Network is very concerned about everything that happens to them after that. - If you can imagine that people throw away their computers every three years maybe, they throw away their phones almost every two years, multiply that human being in the world, a mountain, a huge mountain of e-waste.

You've got cuts, reuse, reuse. - Minimize, reuse, reuse the good word of art, but its most important reduction side is always forgotten. It all ends up being reused. Maybe about half of your old electronics goes to South Africa, and rightly so, we'll give it another life. They can fix it in a market where it sounds really good. - But most of the time they can't fix it. Sometimes the contents of our devices wear out very quickly or are glued together instead of screws, making them thinner than the competition. Instead of finding a second life on Earth, our toxic waste can find its way into the garbage dump. - We knew we had to follow this rubbish to tell the story. We made a plan when we went out to work again in the US and threw computer equipment with a GPS tracker installed on it. - Their findings were incredible. 40% of the waste that was to be reused in the US was sent to unsanitary yards overseas. - There is no pollution control and most of them are in Southeast Asia, on farms so it pollutes most of the local food. - BAN came out with their GPS details. - Blew people's minds because they were like being caught, and then it made the industry behave better. We now have a program called E-Stewards which is a program to certify good boys' certificates. - The process is not yet complete but E-Stewards recruits use a number of robust methods to make recycling safe and environmentally friendly. Cascade Asset Management is one of those E-Stewards recyclers. - We work about 300,000 to 400,000 pounds of electronics a month so we deliver a lot of art here. - Cascade is able to repair and sell 30% of its listing before resuming it. But the pace of modern technology can be hard to keep up with. - We're starting to see more smartphones and tablets coming, some things are probably only two or three years old and there's no life left in them. - When I was growing up you would buy a toaster or refrigerator for at least 20 years, but the manufacturers don't design equipment that will last a long time so they actually plan to expire. Sure electronics change quickly but can expect improvement. Do we really need things to die so quickly? - You may have been told before that you should buy small items, that you should eat them with great care, but in order to empower consumers to make those options manufacturers need design things to last longer. Right now that’s a tough sale for big companies that do our technology but some startups are aware of it. - I have been in the electronics industry for 11 years and I realized it could not be fixed. Suppose I were to buy a new machine and the charging port stopped working, but it was almost like a behavioral problem and I found a repairman. Would I buy a new machine?

Sharad Mittal, founder of smartphone company Tera cube saw a third option. Make the phone really designed to last longer and be easy to repair. The result is a very friendly device. - Teracube 2e, works like any other smartphone, is an Android smartphone, running all the apps available in the Google Play store. We've put recycled plastics in the phone body. A unique feature is a four-year payment care warranty. No glue has been used, so anyone can separate them and we will make recreational parts available for people to repair. Modular and durable materials are just a few ways manufacturers can help consumers stay current without throwing their entire device away. Organizations such as iFixit are also promoting more flexibility in making technical guides and phone backups available to all users to encourage people to customize their devices. - You know, we think we live in a democracy but we can afford it, that changes our world more than political politics or not.