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Where Computers Go To Die
broohaha writes "Salon.com has a featured article on where all our unwanted techno trash gets sent, and what is not being done enough to account for all the so-called 'recycling' we're doing. From the article: 'More than 50 percent of our recycled computers are shipped overseas, where their toxic components are polluting poor communities. Meanwhile, U.S. laws are a mess, and industry and Congress are resisting efforts to stem the effluent of the affluent.' Some sites to visit dedicated to attacking the problem are Computer Take Back Campaign and Ban Action Network."
It's easy! They go to museums considering they don't die "as often".
That's Basel Action Network, not Ban Action Network!
http://www.systemrecycler.com/
Disabled guy takes old equipment, cleans and refurbishs it, repairs it if needed, loads Linux and gives it away to the needy.
Some of it is resold to cover basic costs but it's pretty much a non-profit.
What do you mean, there's no silicon heaven?
~egilhh
Of course the Bush administration is at least partially to blame for this. If they had approved the Kyoto protocol, it would be harder for the USians to ship their trash to other countries to dispose of it.
Impeach Bush, he is evil!
Not too long ago, a french ship lined with toxic asbestos was sent to India (finally had to be returned) and had wide coverage in media. The poor are happy to take these things apart and make some quick cash without any knowledge of long-term ill effects. Sometimes, the hunger and immediate needs prevail over any consideration of long-term ill effects.
2 0.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4577198.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/46924
Our router vendor told us that some models will not be available in Europe anymore, because they contain lead and other dangerous stuff. He also told us that they will continue to sell it in USA and Asia, "because it is not illegal".
Companies don't care about the environment, until governments force them to care.
"Click on the sponsor logo: to read this article and all of Salon for FREE"
BAN = Ban Action Network?
Isn't that kind of like:
STOP = Stop Teachers Against Pollution?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
April 10, 2006 | A parade of trucks piled with worn-out computers and electronic equipment pulls away from container ships docked at the port of Taizhou in the Zhejiang Province of southeastern China. A short distance inland, the trucks dump their loads in what looks like an enormous parking lot. Pools of dark oily liquid seep from under the mounds of junked machinery. The equipment comes mostly from the United States, Europe and Japan.
For years, developed countries have been exporting tons of electronic waste to China for inexpensive, labor-intensive recycling and disposal. Since 2000, it's been illegal to import electronic waste into China for this kind of environmentally unsound recycling. But tons of debris are smuggled in with legitimate imports, corruption is common among local officials, and China's appetite for scrap is so enormous that the shipments just keep on coming.
In Taizhou's outdoor workshops, people bang apart the computers and toss bits of metal into brick furnaces that look like chimneys. Split open, the electronics release a stew of toxic materials -- among them beryllium, cadmium, lead, mercury and flame retardants -- that can accumulate in human blood and disrupt the body's hormonal balance. Exposed to heat or allowed to degrade, electronics' plastics can break down into organic pollutants that cause a host of health problems, including cancer. Wearing no protective clothing, workers roast circuit boards in big, uncovered woklike pans to melt plastics and collect valuable metals. Other workers sluice open basins of acid over semiconductors to remove their gold, tossing the waste into nearby streams. Typical wages for this work are about $2 to $4 a day.
Jim Puckett, director of Basel Action Network, an environmental advocacy organization that tracks hazardous waste, filmed these Dickensian scenes in 2004. "The volume of junk was amazing," he says. "It was arriving 24 hours a day and there was so much scrap that one truck was loaded every two minutes." Nothing has changed in two years. "China is still getting the stuff," Puckett tells me in March 2006. In fact, he says, the trend in China now is "to push the ugly stuff out of sight into the rural areas."
The conditions in Taizhou are particularly distressing to Puckett because they underscore what he sees as a persistent failure by the U.S. federal government to stop the dumping of millions of used computers, TVs, cellphones and other electronics in the world's developing regions, including those in China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and Africa.
Because high-tech electronics contain hundreds of materials packed into small spaces, they are difficult and expensive to recycle. Eager to minimize costs and maximize profits, many recyclers ship large quantities of used electronics to countries where labor is cheap and environmental regulations lax. U.S. recyclers and watchdog groups like Basel Action Network estimate that 50 percent or more of the United States' used computers, cellphones and TVs sent to recyclers are shipped overseas for recycling to places like Taizhou or Lagos, Nigeria, as permitted by federal law. But much of this obsolete equipment ends up as toxic waste, with hazardous components exposed, burned or allowed to degrade in landfills.
BAN first called widespread attention to the problem in 2002, when it released "Exporting Harm," a documentary that revealed the appalling damage caused by electronic waste in China. In the southern Chinese village of Guiyu, many of the workers who dismantle high-tech electronics live only steps from their jobs. Their children wander over piles of burnt wires and splash in puddles by the banks of rivers that have become dumping grounds for discarded computer parts. The pollution has been so severe that Guiyu's water supply has been undrinkable since the mid-'90s. Water samples taken in 2005 found levels of lead and other metals 400 to 600 times what international standards consider safe.
In the summer of 2005, Puckett investigat
In Belgium (and maybe also in other European countries), this problem is solved by asking a recycling tax and making vendors responsible for recycling old hardware and household appliances.
When buying something, a customer has to pay a small amount of money (for instance: 0,5 for a mobile phone), but in return, he can return his old devices to the vendor. The vendor then sends it to the manufacturer who recycles it.
Due to an EU directive, computer recycling will become compulsary in the UK in 2008: the related article here describes how the WEEE[sic] will force computer manufacturers to be responsible for their products, by providing a recycling service for *all* the electronic devices they sell.
linking to stories on Salon.com with their force history channel ad to read the story is also a problem.
I have generally been able to reuse my old computer stuff...as I upgrade my main pc i move old computers to new tasks...(my old PC is now the Domain Controller for my home network) my 2nd oldest PC is now my media server....etc.
additonally this or that parts I no longer needed have been given/sold to other people for reuse.
I did have a really old computer that i really had no valid use for...I took it to a recycling facility (along with some dead items broken monitor/printers..etc..) I guess hopefully they are more ethical than some of the companies in the story.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Looks like they've been recycling the grammar manuals over at Salon a little too much...
Please help metamoderate.
Why can't anything be simple? Are people really that greedy? I guess what'll happen is some certification will spring up "100% true recycling" or something. These things tend to work out in the end.
Due to an EU directive
So what does it feel like to not be able to make your own country's laws?
What does it feel like that all EU votes are deemed invalid unless you vote "the correct" way (see Ireland's votes)?
It must really suck to not have democracy over there.
Of course, you are usd to being rulled by your betters (i.e. nobles).
I mean the loser of an election here bitchs about "no democracy", but that is just cover for them feeling bad that the majority of Americans don't agree with them. Win or lose our elections actually accomplish something. In the EU they don't do anything, except create another re-vote.
No wonder so many British are running to Australia and New Zealand.
People have junk they don't want. People pay other people to take the junk. A third group of people whine.
And when you do, you get to the main page of Saloon, where you have to sift through all the headlines to find your article.
Once you've located it, click on it, you get back to the page where you initially come from, with only the teaser text and the click-on-sponsor link.
Reminds me about the old turn-over-the-card jokes...
Überlame.
IIRC, Kyoto is all about the carbon output. With respect to old computers, Kyoto would have only made the situation worse. Since China and India are exempt from Kyoto, even more old gear would be sent there so that the CO2 generated from recyling the metal wouldn't have to be monitored, counted, or paid for as it would (in theory) in the West.
Not that it really matters, IMHO, it's only a matter of time before Kyoto is officially declared dead. Here in Canada we're hopelessly behind our goal, the only way to meet our target would be to buy a billion dollars of CO2 credits from Russia -- which would have exactly zero impact on CO2 emmissions because Russia's CO2 credit surplus is due to a timing fluke relating to their collapsing economy in the post-Cold War period.
With China, India, and most other developing countries exempt from Kyoto, (and to a lesser extent, the USA opting out) there's very little incentive for those who have signed on to actually do anything. Plus, the costs of meeting the targets through technology (e.g. hybrids, or new power plants, or home upgrades) are enormous.
Yes, you send it to the manufactuer. The manufacturer then sends it to a 3rd world country where it isn't really recycled at all, it just sits there and pollutes the enviroment.
That's pretty much the point of the article, and you missed it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
As a fairly poor college student who left the computer industry during the 2001 depression I have lots of broken/obsolete computer hardware and not allot of money. The prices they charge at the recycle centers to take this stuff are quite steep for some one like myself (20 bucks for a monitor is a weekends worth of micro brews for me after all :) ) making just dumping them in the dumpster near my house extremely tempting. I'm sure there are allot of people less eco conscious than myself who see fit to just throw this crap away rather than pay the fairly hefty processing fees associated with proper disposal.
I wonder how polluted our own landfill is due to this.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Isn't it interesting how this topic is framed in terms of pop sociology? It does no one any good to frame this problem in these terms, any more than efforts against infectious disease are helped by discussions of humors and prescriptions for bloodletting. The problem isn't a matter of affluence but of responsibility.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Part of the problem is that we junk our old computers or 'recycle' them. There are plenty of individuals and organisations that don't want or need a brand-new computer and would happily take our old machine. When I was a graduate student, I used to buy second-hand computers from my department every couple of years. I passed on my old machine to my 88-year-old neighbour and slapped Debian Woody on it (it works fine, by the way, and she now uses it constantly for keeping in contact with her family and for genealogy).
These days, if I wanted an old machine, I'd probably use Freecycle. This is simply a Yahoo forum for people who want to give away (or get for free!) unneeded items.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
by keeping all my old computers. They all have a use, if for nothing more than a file server or router or something.
As far as I know there is no "silver bullet" out there. That is, there is no clean great solution (clean and cheap enough to not drive tech companies out of business). Recylcing isn't that clean, dumps aren't that clean, and even if sending old computers to poor areas that they are still "fast" works now it eventually will not. If there is then I will agree to push to legislate it.
While I will not purchase from known pulluters if possible (as is my right to choose), I can't say I blame companies if a country out there says "Send me your crap - we will take care of it cheap". I don't see how one can feel justified in controlling international trade in ways they like but not in ways they do not as "like" tends to be personal and arbitrary (even if your line in the sand is pollution the next person may be "terrorism" or something else). You get control or no control - personally I choose as little control as possible and only where a clear line is.
Even then you need a clear plan in opposition - we have the discarded computers and "Can't do anything with them" isn't a solution (they have to do something with them). Yes, maybe it's REALLY bad for the environment but the stuff is there and we have to do something.
In this you can not make a clear line in the sand, only a random one where you feel it needs to be. Nothing really wrong with that other than many will have other random lines in the sand (and you do not get angry and worked up because someone has a different line in the sand).
Eh, anyway, this has been a known issue even in the early 90's when I first got into computing - I assume it was known before then, although I do not know how long before (my guess is even in the early days of computing).
Finally, don't take this as a too negative post. If you have a solution that allows companies to stay in business and is clean - by all means propose it and I'll support it. This isn't anything close to something I keep up with, only through news blurbs. Every one I see is complaints, no solutions. Complaints are OK as long there is a solution - I have been going bald since my early 20s, complaining about it hasn't stopped anything. Sometimes every choice sucks and you choose the least sucky (for instance, cost and effectiveness for baldness cure is horrid, thus best option is to accept it and go on unless you are one of the unusal individual that it works for).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
When the equation changes, we'll figure out a better way and we'll gradually start doing something different. This pattern hasn't changed for centuries.
An interesting business idea (unpatented as of yet) for you speculative investors, would be to collect and safely store (in landfills, or wherever) large amounts of technological waste of known quality (say, cellphones and ipods only, no monitors, or something). Then sit on it for a few decades, and wait for mining and recovery/recycling technology to catch up. Sort of like buying up land that has oil shale on it. You know we'll probably need it someday.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
www.freegeek.org
:D
Freegeek operates in Portland. I do volunteer work there and it's a neat place. They take old hardware, strip it, recycle what they can, and the rest gets put into their rebuilding program.
They take the decent stuff, and after testing it gets built into new systems (Yes, they put linux on them!) and given to other non profits, needy types, etc.
The beauty of the system is that they teach volunteers to build these sytems. The volunteers learn a bit, build so 6 systems, then they get to take the sixth home with them.
So, Freegeek does the following:
Recycles old hardware
gives "new" boxes to good causes
teaches people how to build a computer
teaches people how to use linux
gives people who can't afford a computer a chance to earn one
All around, a damn fine setup... And before you ask them, no they don't have one in INSERT YOUR CITY HERE.
There was a report on TV some time back (investigative report) which wondered why communities charged for recycling so they decided to find out.
They tagged some recycling trucks and followed them to their final destination:
The city dump.
If the story ended there it would have been sensationalistic enough, but the next day they showed what goes on at the city dump.
Normal trash, and trash from recycled bins got fed into these giant conveyor belts where workers sorted through the trash and pulled out all the recyclable material before it got burned.
They asked the landfill operator why, and they said because they make money off the recycling.
After I saw that piece I haven't worried one bit about nor recycling, and I haven't paid for it either. Why should I pay a company money to do some work when it doesn't mean anything in the end and they in turn are just going to make more money?
No thank you.
I'm sure the same happens with PCs and equipment. Copper is valuable. So is gold. If there's money to be made, someone will figure out a way of extracting the raw materials. If the process is not environmentally friendly then that's a different problem.
Power plants didn't used to be environmentally friendly until the laws were changed which forced power companies to install scrubbers and catalytic converters. If you require the recycling companies to clean up their acts then they will.
Not out of me, it won't generate any! I have multiple levels of advert blocking. Ad-blocking proxy, list of sites with blocked images, and no flash player. Sweet!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Anytime one of these articles comes up, someone posts a link to Free Geek, your local place where technology is recycled. That is because people think Free Geek is awesome. Because it is awesome. Although, you know, you can also learn a lot about Free Geek here
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
There should be a moderation like that, anyway.
> sees as a persistent failure by the U.S. federal government to stop the > dumping of millions of used computers, TVs, cellphones and other
> electronics in the world's developing regions, including those in China
I don't see it as dumping if the Chinese are smuggling the stuff in..
I agree that it sucks to live in a third world country, and it sucks to live in a polluted environment. But what will these people do for food if they can't recycle? Will they starve?
It's easy for rich fat Americans and Europeans to be critical of situations that put people and the environment at risk.. But we mostly all have food to eat every day, and homes, and money. I'm reluctant to pass judgement on other people I don't know or understand. If was starving I would work a dangerous job to buy food.
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
They don't want our garbage, they want our money, and if that means them having to take the garbage, well, they'll take the garbage and the money for now...
2^3 * 31 * 647
Any Red Dwarf fan knows Silicon Heaven does exist.
"The concept is used to keep robots, many of which are stronger and more intelligent than their masters, from rebelling; a belief chip is installed in robots to ensure that they will believe that they will go to Silicon Heaven after a life of servitude to humanity."
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
One problem with the large number of "obsoloete" machines in need of disposal or recycling/re-using is that they are normally perfectly good machines for light use. For example, the person who buys their machine just to email and surf the web should realistically expect to get 5 years+ use out of it. i would expect far more than that if the hardware does not fail.
There seems to be a lot of forced upgrading among those who don't need more power, whether that be for new OSs requiring more sophisiticated hardware, or that PC manufacturers have redesigned the internals again and you cannot buy a replacement PSU/whatever for your old machine when it blows.
With more considerations paid to backward compatability as well as component quality I think we could cut waste quite a bit.
This is just an observation. What do you think?
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
I work a help-desk job part-time at the college I'm studying at. They are frequently upgrading hardware at Confederation College, so older equipment that gets replaced (along with the junk that is just plain broken) gets sent to a first-floor storage room lovingly referred to as "The Pit". We recently did inventory down there and sorted through hundreds of old monitors, printers and computers. Lots of stuff gets hauled away (at cost to us) and some gets recycled. A fair amount of gear that still works gets sold off in a "yard sale" to students and resident nerds who need to install linux or bsd on anything they can get their hands on. Fun stuff always.
The problem is you. Its you slashdot people. What hypocratism. I love it, you are all pointing the finger for this problem at anyone else but yourself. You are the people who are upgrading, you are the people who, as noisy wheels in your organization and popular sneezers, and powerusers, driving and fueling the whole obsolecence machine.
If you would of been happy with your Mac SE and 486 back in 86, this problem would not exist. But nooo, you had to keep upgrading, couldn't be satisified with what you had, had to move more bits and have faster technology. In the end though, you are still trapped in the same world you were before, unable to do more than shuffle and store and change bits around.
Look in the mirror. Any toxic mess that exists in piles of junked 386's and lead monitors, is your fault.
Amazingly nobody complains about toxic waste being sent to the very same countries where the American jobs are exported.
Since hearing about the extent of this problem on NPR Science Friday a few months ago, I've decided to just hang on to my stuff until there's some decent way to get it REALLY recycled.
I mostly reuse computer cases, just swapping out mainboards. Mainboards and old PCI cards can stack pretty compactly. It's the couple of old dead CRTs that are really taking up the space.
I'll take them somewhere when I can be confident that they'll be handled in a sane manner. They'll probably still be in my basement in 20 years, knowing how fast things move in the environmental regulation area, particularly internationally.
There are solutions - these can easily be implemented by huge electronics multinationals making millions from consumer electronics sales, encapsulated in a short phrase - clean it up and take it back:
1. Take out the toxic chemicals - if manufactures take out the worst toxic chemicals from their products then it is easier and safer to reuse and recycle them. This doesn't stop them being dumped in Asia but it at least makes products easier to recycle and less dangerous for those handling them. Some companies like Nokia, Sony and HP have already committed to do this. Others like Dell and Apple haven't.
2. Take it back. The companies who made the products should be responsible for them at the end of their lives. If manufactures had to do this there would quickly be design changes made by the companies - consumers would get products that last longer, products would be designed to contain less dangerous chemicals and be easier to recycle because the company that makes them has to deal with the waste. After pressure from Computertakeback companies like Dell and HP support the principle of producer responsibility. In contrast Apple clearly doesn't think its their problem.
If any industry can change it's the innovative, fast moving consumer electronics industry. They are promoting fast turn over of consumer items so they should be tackling the consequences.
Tom
What about all the faulty iPods?
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
"Why pick on the USA: it is a large country"
I guess that explains why you don't pick on Luxembourg and Iceland, I mean, they are small profligate countries, but why not pick on Canada?
I thought that exploding population has (recently) been the most effective solution to exploding population.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Yep. Sending asbestos death ships to India is definitely in the "forefront of modern environmental practises (sic)." http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=18274 9&cid=15104210
OK, OK. I freely admit that referring to arivanov's post doesn't generate a lot of credibility.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
It wouldn't; methinks he was just hoisting the old petard in an effort to win some karma by trashing the US, Bush in particular. It's quite a popular past-time, really.
Factual correctness and logic often takes a backseat to an argument's ability to blame America in general and G.W. Bush in particular, in case you haven't noticed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What's the problem here?
There's people and places willing to take away the refuse and deal with it in a manner that we don't have to see or hear about. The people ripping the useful bits out of this gear get to make some cash, and the rest of us don't have to fill our basements with our employer's old servers.
What's the problem?
There's too much beauty upon this earth for lonely men to bear. -- Richard Le Gallienne
So let's cut it down and pave it over.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Problem is two fold.
1 - too many people believe that P-III 500 they paid $1500.00 for in 1998 is still worth $1000.00 and will not sell it for less so it will sit in a closet for 3 more years and then silently get thrown in the trash.
2 - Way too many people believe that you have to have a Pentium4 or better and 2GHZ or faster to do anything. I can edit a full length feature film, do Advanced CG graphics at broadcast quality and everything else productive that is done today on much older hardware. Hell we have a old intergraph Graphics Workstation here with dual P-II 350's in it with a old copy of Lightwave that can do amazing things (and has! the M&M animated characters on TV were done on that same hardware and software revision)
and that is with windows, install a properly chosen and configured linux on it and it can be faster "feeling" than a XP machine on modern hardware.
Way too much get's tossed based on a belief that it is un-useable. I fished out of the trash here at work a pair of Dell poweredge servers that had only P-III processors in them. They scream as SQL and File servers at home, and a smaller company would kill for that kind of resources that a larger company happily tosses in a dumpster.
Obsolete = useful in different ways. I have old obsolete 386 pc104 formfactor computers all over michigan on towers acting as ham radio digipeater data collection nodes running an obsolete linux kernel and had rolled Filesystem to fit on a 4meg flash. that 1.X kernel is supposedly "unsafe" but nobody can hack them unless they want to climb up 200 feet.
these old computers would rock for a robot "brain" for robotics... adda rat-shack VEX kit and go the next step from remote control erector set to real robot.
There is lots of life left in "obsolete" computers and computer parts.
Hell I keep around dead motherboards and cards simply because I never have to buy surface mount resistors and capacitors anymore... Harvest the boards for free parts to feed my electronics hobby!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Of course there's a silicon heaven. Where would all the calculators go?
Seems like this would just lead to a lot of tax evasion, unless the deposit/tax collected was very small. Maybe the transportation costs in Norway outweigh the benefit, but here in the U.S., it seems like it would hand a lot of business to shady mail-order houses that just don't pay the tax. If you tried to implement that here in the States, people would just buy stuff off of eBay or from tiny storefront-less operations via PriceWatch; nearly impossible to keep track of, they're here one day, gone the next. The brick and mortar stores are already screaming because they get hit for sales tax while this is easily avoided by mail-ordering out of state, I can only imagine the opposition you'd have to an additional non-trivial levy that they were supposed to collect.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You should contact your local landfill and see if they offer an free recycling dates for electronics. I found myself in a similar situation as yours previously and then I found a program at the landfill.
Electronics are accepted for recycling three days a month from 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. The collection is held at the Hazardous Waste Facility located at the Broome County Landfill. There is no fee for residential users. Visit www.gobroomecounty.com or call (607) 778-2250 for collection dates. Materials Accepted: Monitors, printers, CPU's, televisions, VCR's, stereos, laptops, keyboards, two-way radios and fax machines - From my local landfill website http://www.gobroomecounty.com/dpw/DPWLandfill.php
nothing
For is it not written, "the iron will lie down with the lamp."
This sig all sigs devours
Rather than throw old PCs into the trash and fueling the waste problem find new uses for them.
For example, old PCs 386 or later, can be reused as a router/firewall. They provide excellent security for your home LAN while keeping it out of the waste pile. Being floppy based, Freesco does NOT require a hard disk! Install the software and reuse the PC or give it to someone who will. See:
http://www.freesco.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FREESCO/
Later PCs, such Pentium 400 MHz or later, can be reused as MythTV PVRs by adding an inexpensive TV tuner ($20-$30) I have gotten PCs as old as P2 266MHz 128 MB to have some limited PVR functionality. (contact me if interested in old PC PVRs)
http://amicus.sourceforge.net/
Practically any PC, 386 or better, can run lightweight Linux distributions such as DSL or Debian for general purpose computing.
http://damnsmalllinux.org/
http://debian.org/
These are just three low cost methods I have personally used to recycle old computers. Use your imagination and Google, and you can see there are many other options too. Don't throw it away, make the old PC into something useful reuse it or give it to someone who will!
Andrew Lynch
hopefully you haven't swallowed the cianide pill just yet... as you failed it where the first post is concerned, hate to see you botch the suicide as well....
Complete with pram-pushing single mothers participating in the "20 Mayfair Fag Dash", three pseudo-"Ganstas" with K-Swiss trainers and enormous Diamonique ear studs (WHY??!??!?!?!) and four thousand burberry-capped hoodie thugs drinking Red Stripe out of a plastic bottle. Wait... I've just described most city centres in Labour's "New Britain".
I simply cannot wait to emigrate out of this over-taxed, minority-ruled dump.
Agreed, I've been on Freecycle for a while and it's a great way to both get rid of extra stuff you have around (working stuff, that is) and sometimes get something neat for free.
Really the only downside to it is that it uses Yahoo Groups, which I am not a huge fan of, to run its mailinglist, but aside from this I think it's a good concept, well executed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My tab in Firefox says:
Slashdot: Where Computers Go To Die.
Struck me as funny anyway.
jeff
sdg
Sure, but if we had effective legislation in the developed world to mandate *safe* recycling of computers, there would still be a similar number of computers world-wide to be recycled, it's just that those who did the work would have better working conditions.
Basically the cost would be shifted to the purchase price of computer equipment (assuming an EU WEEE type legislation), from the health of the poor in the developing world. I don't see this as a bad thing myself.
This sig all sigs devours
Recursion on the brain ;)
Damn Americans
I've noticed that one of the prevalent comment subjects with regards to this article is that either "I can always find a use for my old hardware" or "I know somewhere around here that has a free swap/refurbish service." Which is great, don't get me wrong. The thing is, computer-techy-types are, by their very nature, not inclined to throw out old hardware, as they will be able to find some use for it, whether it be to re-purpose it at home or create a Frankenstien box that they can give to someone who can use it. Most enthusiasts of any kind are like this -- car enthusiasts will save parts in their garage for years after they've sold the car, just in case they need it someday; handicrafts enthusiasts just won't throw out that leftover/old piece of fabric/paper/etc. because they know that once they do, that'll be just the thing that they have to go out and buy.
It's not the enthusiasts that fill up junkyards/landfills/ships to China/India. It's people who don't know/care much about the subject that just junk their stuff as soon as it's no longer the "latest and greatest." It's not just individuals, but companies that do this (although larger companies often have a plan where they send their older hardware to be used in schools or community centers or some such).
Something that every nerd and geek can do to help reduce useful hardware going to junkyards/landfills/overseas is to let their friends and coworkers know that much of the stuff that people are throwing out can be repurposed. This goes for not just computers, but most electronic equipment. A lot of people just throw out their old TVs/VCRs/DVD players/etc. too (even though they still work or just need a tiny repair). And being the person that everyone knows is into recycling/repurposing has the side benefit of probably being the person who receives the hand-me-down hardware!
"We all, in the first world, consume more than our fair share of energy per head"
Not really. The third world needs to explain why they breed like rats and don't produce much of value either monetarily or culturally. They're little more than ticks on the larger human body.
Only the flies seem to like them.
How about HDTV? Doesn't it need a higher end specs box?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This story is just more BS. First, the photos look staged...no one would hammer a CRT at that angle. But the real problem is the issue of the guilt trip.
First, we but the stuff from China, exporting our jobs. Then we send it back, often as a gift for the underprivileged, and then we get blamed for dumping 'toxic waste'. What BULLSHIT.
There's still the question of the need to upgrade every three years, which is the cycle a lot of organizations use. It's plainly not neccessary for most users. Even using bloated Windows XP, it will run just fine for web browsing and word processing on a 800 mhz machine with 256mb of ram, and yet machines twice as powerful as this are being tossed because they are 'outdated'. I was just at a meeting where there was discussion of giving corporate leftovers to the underprivileged, and there was scoffing at "one gigiahertz junk". Instead, there's a push on to scrap all this stuff (sending it to China I guess) and spend $500 on new computers (Apples, no less) for the needy. What arrogance. What greed. It makes me sick.
What makes Americans inherently better at cleaning up these computers than the "poor countries" that get them? The citizens of those countries should fix their own countries, just like Americans fixed our own country. They're not savages, slaves or animals. And we're not their keepers. We're just the country spending most of the money to produce these incredible productivity enhancing, communications-barrier-destroying miracles that poor countries get to use, even though they couldn't afford to produce them by themselves. They're the country that has all the low-hanging fruit dangling in their faces, with America's good examples of how to get and use freedom so well demonstrated, as well as so many ways to screw up freedom demonstrated - advantages we never had. Those countries should take our computers and take their own freedoms, like cleaning up their country instead of polluting it.
--
make install -not war
that's why they're there
...you're STEALING the WEB! :-p
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
That's why it falls upon private industry, becuase there is a profit to be made.
Case in point, you could spend $15 to give your CRT to city waste department where I live, or you could spend $5 to give it to the recycling company I work for. BEcause of a contract with the city we end up with the monitor either way, it's just a mtter of paying the middle man. I would be that a lot of other places are doing the same, they're charging you for their trouble as well as the cost that they're going to have to pay someone else to do the work,
then new PCs. e.g. my 200mhz dell's processor pulls 30 watts as opposed to my Athlon's 90. You really only see low power PCs in business and desktop environments (and laptops). Most users are still buying cheap Dell Boxen with 300 watt power supplies running full on.
Besides, once you hit 200-300 mhz with a tnt/rage128 class graphics card you can do any 2D task you care to name. That was a major concern for PC venders back in the day: how are we gonna get people to upgrade when this year's models are only sightly better? luckily Microsoft to the rescue with bloatware 5.1 SP2, but you can still get by quite nicely with a pared down Linux install running Abiword/Gnumeric/Firefox.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Drive along any of the 'i' highways (not similar to iMacs) and find burnt out cars, CRT monitors, and old PCs. Go into random off-highway marshes off major US highways and find the same. We've all seen them. Having garbage scattered isn't that uncommon anywhere
It's US policy to not sign any agreement that restricts or may restrict the US's action in the future. It's rather short-sighted in my opinion, as if they have to resort to some of these actions, there are other issues at stake. Now whether they abide by the treaties anyway without signing is another story. Guess what? The US hasn't signed any greenhouse gas treaties either... That doesn't mean they're doing nothing to reduce emissions or tighten up allowances.
What this all comes down to is simple:
- why do countries accept things they know are harmful for their people? I know many car mechanics who have guys coming by all the time offering to take used tires, brake rotors, etc for scrap. Some want money and get paid for it (and you can imagine they end up in a river somewhere). Others actually recycle it for the scrap metal and rubber.
- ignorance is bliss. the US sends trash off under the front that they believe it's being safely recycled and handled. If it's not, that's another problem, and something that needs to be dealt with within the offending country.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Yes, you'd be amazed at the "junk" you can get rid of with Freecycle.
My company had a pile of older computers (from 286s up to low end Pentiums) to get rid of. Rather than paying the local computer recycler to haul them away, we offered them on Freecycle.
One guy took them all, and was going to put them to use for data collection for vending machines.
It's a great way to unload all that extra junk in your garage/basement too.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
One of the tasks of the Widernet project is to take old PCs, install a static copy of part of the Internet on them, then ship the computers to developing countries in Africa so that they can benefit from the knowledge without having a dedicated connection. For working equipment, this would be an excellent way to keep the computers from being junked.
I'll start out by saying I completely agree with you, but I think there are other factors to consider. Obviously these companies want you to buy the most recent thing - that's how they make a profit. I'm sure they care on an individual level, but ask them if they want to keep their job and I'm sure the newest version of software X will only run on the fastest hardware Y.
I would like to think we (the population as a whole) could completely recycle all our computers, but I doubt there are enough people with electronics hobbies to satisfy the number of computers meeting "end of life" every day. Nor are there enough people who think of novel ideas for their old 386 other than a recipe organizer.
Maybe the best option is to come up with a better way of interchanging parts on motherboards and such. A standard size/interface for RAM, easy pop-out chipsets, etc. Companies could try selling remanufactured devices made from recycled parts.
"Basically the cost would be shifted to the purchase price of computer equipment (assuming an EU WEEE type legislation), from the health of the poor in the developing world. I don't see this as a bad thing myself."
We'll keep this in mind next time someone on slashdot complains about the price of the latest Nvidia or ATI card.
Who really gives a fuck about toxic pollution in China anyway? The Chinese are the biggest racists on the planet. They think all whites are dogs and that brown colored people are even worse. Let them poison themselves! Fuck'em! Maybe they'll learn to be a little less judgemental when 1/2 of their population is growing a third arm.
When I was a kid I used to go skiing in the winter, now I go bike riding. What will change the next 10 years?
Something IS happening, and I blame the polution until someone gives me something else to blame.
Want something else to blame? Our sun's output has been going thru a phase of increasing output over the last few decades. It's going to get very much hotter too. The govt knows this (as well as most solar researchers) but all involved want the knowledge to be kept suppressed because they wish to postpone the widespread panic that will inevitable. Land in Siberia and Canada in the upper latitudes will be skyrocketing in value.
I'm looking for a recycler in Southern California. Currently I have a huge pile of good working hard drives (mostly Wide SCSI, 1 to 8 GB, and some IDE), and occasionally have other equipment (PIII-550 or better complete systems) to give away. I'd rather give to a charity like Freegeek than just some guy on Freecycle who will eBay them. Any suggestions?
Wow, sparky, that comment's gonna get you some SERIOUS negative karma. Think of all the nerds lucky enough to have wives or girlfriends. Women that put up with our shit on a daily basis... for this post, I'm gonna call them nerd-wifes.
Now, imagine these socially-inept nerds discovering that a regular visit by the junk fairy just takes offering to take old junkers off friends' hands. To a nerd, that sounds like a time-shifter for getting winning lottery numbers or the first chain-letter that is guaranteed to pay off.
I'm a struggling/recovering accumulator of old hardware. Haven't found a 12-point plan to join yet, but a year or so ago, I carried 6 computers and a stack of monitors, SIMM's (yeah, THAT old!) to a charity/thrift store. This took weeks of my darling nerd-wife balancing some blunt requests, coaxing, and a machiavellian blend of passive-aggressive tactics and bedroom gymnastics to convince me. And even then, 4 more have grown back in my garage.
If people started droping random hardware on my porch, my wife'd leave me. I know this. And I can't be the only guy whose gadget fetish is driving some nerd-wife crazy. So you've just poured gasoline on HOW many thousands of these nerd-wife house-fires!?
Serious karma flammage, dude. But, hey... maybe you'll come back as THIS guy. That'd almost be worth it, wouldn't it!?
The biggest problem with manufacturing is that costs get externalized way beyond the original purchaser and manufacturer until they become abstract ideas like Bhopal.
If companies can't design products with a minimal impact or at least deal with recycling costs, then they really can't afford to be in business. They are currently coercing everyone to subsidies their profits through neglect.
The problems can't be insurmountable, or we might as well give up right now. It is a question of political will. No new technologies are going to save us unless we put ourselves in the best position to allow them to work. Simply burying it and hoping for the best isn't cutting it.
"Look, Livingstone! We've found the secret holy Amiga burial ground."
"By Jove! You have. Who knew it would be buried deep within this box canyon with no outlet. There's an Amiga 2000, and a 3000. Wait...What's this? Do you see it, Didsdale? Do you see it?"
"My God, Livingstone! It's a fabled Video Toaster."
"Wait, Didsdale. Do you remember what the acolyte said at the Ruby on Rails Temple?"
"No, Livingstone. Refresh my memory."
"Th Amigians swore that any man who trespassed on the secret holy Amiga burial ground would never leave it alive!"
**schunk** **whoomp**
"Didsdale? Great Scott! There's a spear through Didsdales head!"
"You! you were the acolyte we met at the Ruby on Rails Temple."
"Very perceptive of you, Dr. Livingston."
"You'll not get away with this. I'll tell the whole world where the secret holy Amiga Burial Ground is."
"You do that, Dr. Livingston. No one will believe you or care. Bwa ha ha ha ha!"
"You... you mean you aren't going to kill me!"
"No, but before you go we must place this special brain control device on you."
"What? That iPod."
"Yes. Grab him fellow acolytes."
"Unhand me you fanatics. Get that thing away from me. Nooooooooooo.........."
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Utter nonsense. The main problem with GDP is that it counts all economic transactions, whether creative or destructive. So illness, crime, natural disasters all cause an increase in GDP.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
The manufacturers ought to be putting the "return" in to the sale price.
IF you can not afford to return it (and disassemble it and recycle it) than you can not afford it.
So remember kids, next time you write that algorithm at work to run in O(N^2) instead of O(log N), you're effectively contributing to the pollution problem.
The way I see it, the reason why this work get's done in the third world is because you can make more money at it if you don't have to do it safely. So if you force US or European like EPA rules on the third world you will take this work away from the people who do it now. If they have to follow all the rules that Americans or Europeans have to follow, it probably won't pay to ship the scrap all the way to china just for cheap labor..
So back to my original question/concern. If you take this work away from the people who do it now, what will those people do?
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
I have a lot of computer junk in my basement that I have not gotten rid of due to this problem. I feel that it's better for it to gather dust in my basement (and on my front porch; I have an old tower case I put there that I need to move) than it is for it to leech gunk out of a landfill somewhere.
I went to http://www.computertakeback.com/ and clicked on Missouri and was not given a list of recyclers to go to but instead given bullshit about how great their pledge for recyclers is. That's great and all, but aren't you supposed to be telling me where to dispose of my e-waste? You aren't doing that, c'mon!
So where do I take it? I have an old Mac and miscellaneous other computer parts I don't need. I have an entire system that I will be retiring soon and replacing with a Shuttle-type box or an Intel Mac tower when those are released (though I may re-use a few of the components and put the hard drives in external Firewire enclosures).
I also am hard of hearing and have a large number of used hearing-aid batteries that need to be disposed of. Where can I take my large stash of used batteries for safe disposal? They are not fit to be thrown into a landfill. This is going to be an ongoing need for the rest of my life as I can't see self-powered hearing aids being introduced any time soon!
i am a soviet space shuttle
If you ask me, I think the solution's pretty simple – just don't get rid of the things in the first place. We have around twelve or so machines in our house right now – six of them mine, and at least three others that were at some time – and almost all of them are still in active use, despite the fact that a couple of them are seemingly outdated. But yet I keep them.
:-) It's a really fast machine, though, and with a new video card will be great for gaming. That's how most upgrades go, really – I replace my own box, and give him the old one.
Why? Simple. They're good machines, and they still have a great deal of value to me, so I may as well. And since I typically don't have much money for computer junk – I tend to spend it on much more important things – I figure a slower machine in my room's better than two faster ones that aren't. So that all works out.
Anyway, back to the machines. Right now I have five of my own six boxes in my room. The one is an HP with an AMD64 processor, brand-new, which we got at an auction for $300. Lucky me, but either way the thing's utterly irrelevant. But the others... the others are definitely worth telling.
Now that I have a 64-bit box, my brother's got my old one, which is a 2.4GHz Celeron with 512MB RAM. It's loud as hell, which is why I was so glad to give it to him.
Meanwhile, his old one's come back into my room. It's a COMPAQ DeskPro with a 650MHz Pentium III and 256MB RAM. Very quiet, so I like. Since it's probably my next-best box, I've made it the development machine for my Linux distribution. Not the world's fastest, but it's still pretty damn good, and I see no reason to get rid of it. And it can also be easily re-configured for other things, like recording Flash videos to tape. (I get bored sometimes...) We got the thing on eBay for $55, and I can guarantee that it's worth every penny.
The next machine is a Dell Optiplex, 700MHz Celeron with 128MB RAM. Also $55 on eBay. Very good machine. I tend to buy a lot of machines on eBay, actually, since it's (1) cheap and (2) a good way to save old equipment and/or the environment. Anyway, it's right now my regular desktop box, so I don't have to keep valuable stuff on a development machine. Somewhat slow at times, but other than that just fine. I'm probably going to give it a memory upgrade sometime; it's not too expensive, and it's far preferrable to wasting my time and money getting a new box, moving my stuff over, finding something to do with the old one... besides, I've customized the case a bit, and don't want to lose all my hard work on that!
Next after that is my server. It's the only one of my machines that stays outside my room. It's a 700MHz Duron, 256MB RAM, that my friend dragged over here because his parents didn't like him running it at their place. One of its memory cards is actually from another machine we upgraded; it already had both slots full, so we just stuck the extra RAM into a machine that needed it. Works every time. (Used to be his parents' old machine, by the way. When they got a new one, he was the one who decided to use it for what it's used for now.)
The next machine is my laptop, which I'm typing this on. It's a 233MHz Pentium – the original kind, not a P-II – with 96MB RAM. My aunt gave it to me after she upgraded. It's now replaced my old laptop, which is a Micron XPE, P-133, with 80MB RAM that one of my parents' friends eventually replaced with a new one. My brother has the thing now. Since laptops are so expensive, and hard to find at good prices on eBay, I held on to the thing for years – even after it became "outdated". Still runs just fine as far as I'm concerned.
And speaking of laptops and not throwing them away – this next machine's the spitting image of it. Probably my favorite machine of all time, this GRiD 1720 laptop was built back in 1990, and for all I know may even be a few months older than I am. We've had
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
We do a lot of work with an Arizona based company called Gold Circuit. (web site: www.goldcircuit.com). After watching their videos and getting a plant tour, a question comes to mind. Is it really necessary to send old gear to China/Africa anymore? Are there companies like Gold Circuit in other parts of the world? Does anyone have a list of places to recycle old gear? This is not a company that's in business only to be "green." They are profitable and make their money by recycling old equipment without polluting.
You know, this is where nano-technology could really shine. Make some simply little micro-machines that know how to disassable the various components of your everyday motherboard. Have then attack the board, seperating all the various materials into little piles, which could then be sorted into bigger piles. Suddenly, you've got a big stockpile of raw materials again, to be used in new products without the need to pit-mine anything, or to make/fix your nanobots.
Of course, then they'll get smart and try to build a huge 'bot to rule the world.... but it'll be good for awhile...
Seriously though, this could be a very good use for nanotech in the future. Micro-machinery which can disassemble old stuff for raw materials, which could then be resold at profit.
So a few Chinamen get sick. WoooopDeeeDoooo.
Oh yes, get their daily food by working with those craps everyday,
and then get poisoned by the water polluted by those craps.
How ironic that is!
A friend of mine was a consultant for Dell a few years back.
They took him to one of their plants one day where they hooked a motherboard up to a machine which rotated it and then beat the bloody hell out of it. It beat it until all of the components fell off of it and into a bin.
Then they fed the contents of the bin through a centrifuge to sort these items by weight, etc. Those that could be recycled were, and those that couldn't weren't.
He was told that Congress had a law in the books that within a few years some of these major mfgs were going to be forced to recycle old computers. Apparently Dell was already doing the R&D for this type of operation.
Libertas in infinitum
PII and PIII boxes make very nice routers, file/web servers, secondary terminals (ever need to do remote debugging?), print spoolers, thin clients, syslog servers (you don't keep your syslog on a separate machine for security?), backup servers...
Actually, Pentium 1s make even nicer routers, because they use so little power that they can be run fanless with a large heatsink.
If your definition of "garbage" is "anything that doesn't run Vista and Flash well", then, sure, they're garbage. All I'm saying is that there are a lot of applications for which these computers are quite useful. If *I* didn't have another computer, I'd darn well want a PIII or a PII.
"In addition, older computers don't have modern power-saving options, and consume too much electricity."
Well...I'm not so sure. A 15" CRT uses about 75W, and a 21" CRT about 125W, so you'd have to have the monitor in sleep mode a lot of the time to make up the difference. I would expect that power consumption of CD-ROM drives and hard drives are about the same for old computers and new computers. A Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz (such as the one in the computer I am using at the moment) averages about 65 watts of power (including all the power-saving tricks). A Pentium 1 averages about 15 watts of power, even without power-saving tricks, and a 486 about 4 watts.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Linux can be used as a means to protect our environment, by using its features to save power or paper, since it doesn't require big hardware it may be used with old computers to make their life cycle longer, games may be used in environmental education and software is available to simulate ecological processes. I described this means in the Linux-Ecology-HOWTO.
GNU's Not Unix ... where the "GNU" stands for: ... where the "GNU" stands for: ... where the "GNU" stands for: ...
- GNU's Not Unix
-- GNU's Not Unix
--- GNU's Not Unix
There is a Blog on the topic of EWaste and Electronics Recycling
http://ewasteInsights.info
In it you may find info links and dozens of posts on some of the topics touched on above. It is based in California, where we have some ewaste laws in place.
The biggest single item? As of Feb. 8th, 2006 it is now illegal in California to throw electronics or household batteries into the garbage can. (DTSC Ban) Sweeping Changes in CA Refuse Laws Receive Almost No Publicity