Death By Design

Nearly 5 years ago, I met Ma Jun, China’s leading environmental activist. He told me about his work building a huge database of government pollution records. His goal was to create transparency and raise public awareness about Chinese factories that were ignoring the country’s environmental regulations. The database contains the details of thousands of factory violations across the country. As Ma Jun poured through the entries what shocked him the most was the large number of electronics factories cited – as he said, we think of electronics as a clean industry – but here were thousands of factories working for the most famous brands in the world, discharging tons of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and waste directly into China’s rivers and lakes, land and air.

Ma Jun is a quietly charismatic man and at first I thought I would make a film just about him and his work. But as I learned more about the electronics industry and its history, I realized the tragic environmental scandal he discovered is not confined to China. Communities and workers around the world, from Silicon Valley to upstate New York, to Scotland, to Africa, Korea and Mexico have had their lives poisoned by the toxic materials in our devices. Fortunately, there are other dedicated individuals like Ma Jun: the veteran activist Ted Smith in Silicon Valley, Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules the young founders of iFixit, and inventor Paul Maher in Dublin, all working on the front lines of an environmental battle most of us don’t even know exists.  Death by Design is dedicated to them.