That's one of the reasons why I very rarely sell my devices, I give them to family members who I know will look after them.
One good thing about Apple gear is that they have a pretty decent recycling program (take your old laptop into an Apple store and they will properly recycle it). Also their products have gradually been becoming greener -
http://www.apple.com/environment/
A LOT of energy went into making my Kindles, Macbook Pro, Windows PC, iPhone and iPad. Even optimists say that we only have another 80 years of oil, and these products can't even be built without oil or consumed and abandoned in such a reckless fashion without oil to make the plastic components and fuel the trucks shipping this stuff at a very low cost.
Hopefully one day soon they will invent some better battery technologies, because they are pretty nasty as far as pollutants go.