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The Darker Side of Computer Recycling
Makarand writes "We all know that with electronics it is very difficult to be green. We leave
our computer waste in the recyle bin lest dangerous chemicals like lead and mercury
seep into our landfills. The more dedicated environmentalists make a trip
to the local recyling center where they may be asked around to pay around $15-$30 to recycle their old PCs. But guess what -- these 'recyclers' merely
ship 50-80% of this stuff overseas. The Mercury News has a
report on this ugly side of the PC industry which merely
exports the recycling problems instead of solving them."
.. but what is?
What can we do to eliminate the problem, or, at the very least, tone the issue down a little?
The hardware in question is either too far beyond repair, or to old to serve a useful purpose, so is it best to approach this from a toxic waste disposal point of view, slap an extra $100 onto the cost of your new PC, and treat old computing gear like medical/chemical waste?
I called Dell a few days ago looking to get pricing information. It turns out, with their low-end offering in the Dimension line, you can choose Wordperfect Office, MS Office SBE, or MS Office Pro -- bt not MS Works. On a low-end PC. WTF?
So I called Dell, asking if they could override this and somehow install Works. The rep said: "No." I said "No big deal I guess. I have Office 97 Pro from an old PC which I can install instead." This got him revved up.
Rep: "Well, sir, that's not legal."
Even after explaining that I bought this product at a retail store, and told him that the old PC was being tossed because it was no longer working, I could hear that he still wanted to lecture me.
So I reiterated, "I'm literally throwing out this computer because it doesn't work -- my license therefore is unused, and I can install it on my new PC, right?"
Rep: "That's illegal. Throwing away a PC is illegal. You might be able to see if someone would take it for parts if you gave them $30 or $40, but you can't just throw it away. You might be able to ask the manufacturer to take it back."
I did know this already, and had planned to bring it to my local waste facility for recycling.
But here's the punchline...
Me: "It's a Dell. Will you take it back?"
Rep: "No."
Unintended Results From U.S. Hardware Dumps In Asia [2/25/02]
China Bans U.S. Electronic Scrap [6/1/02]
Recycling The First World, in the Third [8/23/02]
I seem to recall all of these had the usual accompanying photojournalism showing women picking through bushels of desolderied TTL gates and such.
(I'm not saying this is a dupe, I'm just pointing out previous discussions.)
I'm not in the least bit surprised, having read a few court transcripts of cases against recycling firms.
Make no mistake, waste disposal is about big bucks. For many materials such as chemical waste, waste oil, contaminated soil, and manufactured products such as computers, batteries and cars, the costs for recycling are enormous. Consumers, governments and environmentally-conscious firms know this, but are still often willing to pay the hefty disposal fees.
Enter the recycling company. They'll take your toxic waste in exchange for your dollars... and now they have a choice. They can actually dispose of the waste properly while making a small profit, or just dump it somewhere and make a ton of money. So, the oil ends up in the sea, the chemicals are dumped somewhere in Poland, the contaminated soil is diluted with good soil and used in horse riding arena's. The computers end up in China where the valuable items are salvaged by less-than-clean methods.
With the great anounts of money to be made in recycling by sweeping waste under the rug, it is no surprise criminal organisations have taken an interest, and are at least partly involved in a number of recycling firms. In Holland, reputed to be an environmentally conscious country, none of the larger recycling firms has clean hands, and have used any and all of the above methods to cheaply get rid of waste. It's not just the computers, people.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I've pointed out the population explosion in the bay area many times, every time I bring that point up I get modded into oblivion... But fuck it, I got karma to burn...
:) geek cominucae continues) Since we're the teachers its up to us to show the y to the (quote"l4m3rz"unquote) the path to rightiousnuss.
/. ..... it requires some action.
First let me explain why I'm an expert on this. My family has lived in san jose since 1901, we started out here as immigrant sicilian ranchers, and over the years went from being just the fruitpickers to owning a lot of east side san jose, and now we own strip malls (w00t) I hang out on slash because during the boom, I was quite the sysadmin, and came to know this place.
Back to the subject of enviromental disasters...
My great grandfather, grandfather, heck even my uncles could go to any stream in the bay area and fish without worries of toxic fish with 3 eyes. Before milpitas became a great big office complex they would take their shotguns out to the duck blinds and get duck.
These days though, there isn't shit left. Guadelupe river has a big sign "DONT EAT THESE FISH POISONOUS" all along it's banks. They say it's because of the "quicksilver" (read mercury) mines that were prevalent in the almaden valley area, but those existed WAY before IBM, which sits along the coyote creek which is a feeder into the Guadelupe.
What does this have to do with recycling computer stuff? Well let me tell you....
Since i've pretty much been jobless the last 2 years, i've gone back to my second love of bicycle riding. Riding a bike is a lot differerent than driving a car because if you want to stop to look at something.. No big deal. Hit the breaks and stop for a minute..
Last week I was riding along almaden expressway when I saw an AT style case laying in the creekbed (Almaden expressway runs along the guadelupe) I parked my bike, walked over and decided to take a look.
It looked like an old pentium class PC, I whipped out my swiss army knife's phillips attatchment to see what was under the hood..
Well, there was definetly a p133 in there. Nice of socket7 to make it easy to pocket this little treasure. Ram turned out to be 4 16bit EDO ram modules totaling 64 megs.
Hard drive had enough oxidation where I didn't want it, same went for the floppy....
But the point i'm trying to make is here in SV people have been dumping this type of semi usefull electronic shit for years in our creeks, and the combination of population explosion with enviromental hazzards has really fucked up the ecology of SV.
Now moderators, (and rob, cause i know you mod my shit once in a while) please.. This is the god honest truth i'm telling here, any negative mods would be an injustice to the truth (isn't that what good journalism is about anyways?)
Compare San Jose ecological system with a close sister city like portland. Portland OR. has just as many bright talented people as SJ/SV (think M$) The health of their river and stream systems just blows doors over anything we have because they took the time to think ahead (should we whore ourselves out for business or should we keep quality of life in mind)
Here in SJ, people are basically dumping their systems in the creeks and steams. Maybe i'm just being a bit optimistic here, but since so many of us geeks are outta work right now shouldn't we do something about it??? Seriously folks, go download some "router centric" version of *nix, turn those old POS 133's into broadband routers for those not in know. WTF I can find any ISA 3com NIC at a surplus store for less than a dollar.
I love what I used to do, I loved edumucating people on just how they can get the most out of their pc's. In this day and age of firewire capture and such, we need to let people know that their old 486-pentium 200mhz still got some life left in them in the form of hella phat broadband routers that will not only protect them from the evil assholes of the internet, but will log it too (Soooooo much better than my old linksys router)
You know... this is our scene.. And despite GWB being a total cocksucking dickhead to technology (yeah i hear you GWB, u n daddy want oil) we put our faith, our geeky little belief in thing like fuel cells, organic LED's and the like because ultimately we know it's better.
I can't really comment much on the havoc IBM and other companies have wreaked havoc on our ecology, but I know what we gotta do to stretch out the "usefullness" of what we got. And folks, there are two ways you can fucking approach it..
A. educate people..
B. stick your head up your ass.
So my advice to all of you is, if you want to prevent this sort of crap from continueing, DO IT FOR FREE!!! seriously, I consider myself an out of work techno hippie. Set up that killer BSD server with no backdo0rz fo free. Fuck it, aint no shame in promotin yo name. Trust me folks, all the no-geek people out there will love it when you show them how they can use their sprintlink wirelesss dsl to link to an 20 gig archive of data being served over a wireless link. Just don't whine about it, do something!@!!!!!
Well, i hope I've inspired folks to do something instead of whining about it. Sorry u all but im on my second glass of wine and aint coming down. (still can type
Becoming an enviromentall activist on this subject requies more than post on
Yours Truly...
--toq