#5. Your Old Cellphone Is Murdering the Third WorldAmericans 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.This year, the number of cellphones in use will likely exceed the number of people on Earth, which is ... weird, right?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 SandWe 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.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 Taco Bell.#3. There's a Looming Piano CrisisToday, 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. 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 OverflowWhile 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.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 Poop GeysersDue 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.
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