There is also a 6 year old PC and a 9 year old laptop gathering dust in a cupboard. When I finally got round to thinking about selling or donating them, it was just too much of a hassle to plug them in, locate the master CDs and reformat the hard drives. Laziness also meant I never put in the effort to investigate how to dispose of them in an environmentally-responsible way. A quick questioning of my friends confirmed that my apathy is not unique. Most of us have other computers languishing in the dark somewhere.
Consumer electricals are one of the worst contributors to toxic waste. Over 3000 computers are thrown away per day in the UK alone (133,000 a day in the US). Most of these end up in a landfill - most probably one in China and southeast Asia. There is a huge market in these countries for extracting and reconditioning computer parts, but the practice releases chemicals and heavy metals to harm both humans and the environment:
- The average computer contains over 2kg of lead, of which only 100g is recyclable.
- Computer circuit boards contain lead and cadmium.
- The cathode ray tubes in monitors contain lead oxide and barium.
- There's mercury in flat screens and switches.
- There are brominated flame retardants on the plastic casing and cables.
All are highly toxic substances.
A good solution would be for computer manufacturers to recycle products returned to them. Fujitsu is the only company I'm aware of that currently does this. An EU directive - WEEE - comes into force this August that will compel all electrical manufacturers in the European Union to recycle old products. But until the UK Government converts this directive into a UK regulation, it doesn't mean much.
Now the company that popularised the notion of getting rid of junk is urging us to take junk back. eBay in the US has partnered with computer heavyweights IBM, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Gateway and Apple, as well as some US Government agencies, to launch Rethink - a one-stop website for individuals and businesses to resell, donate or recycle their computer and other electronic consumables.
eBay will only link to recyclers who promise not to dump the equipment into the toxic landfills of China, India and other Asian countries. It is even offering a free service to wipe clean any hard drives - one of the major concerns for people thinking of passing on their old computers.
It's ironic, of course, that eBay is one of the largest retailers of electronic goods, and thus itself part of the problem. But I think that Rethink is a great start and promises to be an easy solution for consumers and their own personal landfills.
Related links for the UK:
+ Donate a PC
+ PC recyclers
Other links today:
I've finally gotten the RSS bug and am using FeedDemon news aggregator to read my favourite sites. The result is that if a site doesn't have an RSS feed, I read it less often. Sad, but true. The bottom line is that my RSS reader gets news to me more quickly and saves time. So today's links are RSS-related. Non-tech-nerds can skip them!
+ News on demand. RSS readers deliver exactly the news you need, fast.
+ RSS reader evangelism
+ Does using an RSS/XML feed lower a weblog's hit count?
+ "We will be integrating highly targetted contextual advertising into Bloglines next year [2005]." Buried in a post on the Bloglines CEO's blog. More here. Wow, that's gonna be annoying.
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