Meaningful Movies: Death by Design
Recommended
At the outset of the film, director Sue Williams takes viewers to a milk-colored Yangtze River, where metallic muck sticks to oars and old women beg for clean drinking water. This is very much our doing. There's probably a small voice in every person's head reminding us that the devices we chuck out every couple of years must have sordid production practices on the other side of an ocean, but that voice gets drowned out by a culture constantly hawking the new iPhone 6. Not here. Death by Design takes viewers from the Yangtze to Silicon Valley, where electronics production once poisoned factory workers, and back to China, where all that work—and all the waste—has been outsourced by major US companies looking to cut corners on labor and environmental practices. Everyone should see this film and learn what a "corporate mortality file" is.
by Sydney Brownstone