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Growing Problems With Electronics Waste
eldavojohn writes "The BBC is reporting that many countries are dumping their e-Waste in poorer African nations. From the article, 'The world's richest nations are dumping hazardous electronic waste on poor African countries, says the head of the UN's Environment Programme (Unep).' The problem with e-Waste (versus other wastes) is that the gases and chemicals that make up a lot of electronics are particularly harmful for the environment. I suppose nobody takes their computer, TV or Radio to the repair shop anymore since a new one is a fraction of that cost down at the local convenience store."
The day will soon come. It already has happened cell phones. Enter disposable laptops. To bad disposable != eco friendly.
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
I don't remember the last time I threw away anything electronic. I've still got a Vectrex from 1982 sitting in my basement (still works, tried it earlier this week), still have a working NES and Sega Master System. SNES, Genesis/CD/32X, and Saturn are still hooked up. My old computer (K6) is also still working...when I quit using it as my main system (when I got the Athlon-XP), the K6 got relegated to storage and various network tasks. Of course, this means my house (especially my room) is pretty badly cluttered, lots of stuff lying around...but that's not bad considering how much old electronic stuff I have.
Anyone have an opinion on mandatory recycling? I think it would be a good idea, with fines and fees imposed for throwing recyclable things into the trash, namely electronic items. However, to offset any harshness of the law, recycling must be made free, and by free, I mean paid for by taxes (as long as it's not a property tax, sales tax increase, or income tax increase).
Your mileage may vary, but I replace less hardware due to failure and more hardware because it is obsoleted by new standards, vastly superior next-gen products and aging (not failing) components. My laptop is in good order, but the battery shows its age. Will I get a replacement battery? I doubt it. It's just too expensive when I factor in the advances that a completely new laptop has to offer. I have several computers gathering dust because they're too slow to be of use and I can't run them all as servers because I just don't need that many servers and they would cost too much electricity to just run them idle most of the time.
For a long time I would have agreed with you completely, but since an example of someone fixing their TV turned up on Make today, I'm not so sure.
Yes, TVs and other consumer electrics may be getting more proprietary in their construction, but people are also less inclined to fix them, although examples exist that demonstrate that it is possible.
I think you're in danger of harking back to some "good old day" that never existed whilst also ignoring the fact that most people these days don't want to fix a TV or mess around with a soldering iron in the back of their hi-fi. It's easier, quicker and nicer to buy something new: We don't fix things any more because we don't want to, not because we can't.
I do, but that's just because I'm a misguided greeny with too much money. You get *really* weird looks when you tell the repair guy that yes, even though I could buy a respectibly large new digital tv for the price of getting the 80's crt model fixed, I actually want it repaired regardless. I know it's half a drop in all the worlds oceans combined, but if you can't make sacrifices for the greater good yourself then you can't really complain when others also don't.
Oregon pioneered the idea of bottle deposits. How about we extend the idea to electronics? 1% of the purchase price, with lower and upper caps.
A small repair shop must often gamble on which parts to purchase, and deal with incessant customer grumbling over repair costs. Here are some stories.
I get them from there :)
I wipe the trashed windows xp partitions, stick Ubuntu on them and give them away free to relatives. They love it.
I've had mine for over two years now and I don't think I'll be upgrading until either the battery or the screen completely dies. It's a 1.5Ghz Pentium M with 2 gig of RAM. Linux/GNOME runs like a dream and the only time I need more speed is when I want to compile something... more of a FSB issue than anything else. This just means that I'll stick with pre-compiled binaries as opposed to a gentoo solution for the moment.
Hardware has become cheaper. China has happened. Then there is Linux. Linux is now mature enough as a desktop environment. Very little extra bloat is needed for the Linux desktop... it only needs cleaning around the edges with a standardised interface. Historically the driving force behind increasing PC power usage has been bloatware (the old wintel alliance). Linux has a different business model to MS and is forcing MS to slow down its bloat process. If MS continues to force bloat, then it will open a door for Linux to be installed on smaller, cheaper, less powerful hardware, thus lowering the TCO for a Linux based network operating system.
Personally, I think we are about to see a rapid decline in new PC hardware sales, moving instead towards notebook style PCs. DIY PCs are about to become a thing of the past. Vista is likely to be the last MS operating system that requires a generational hardware upgrade, the maturity of Vista as an operating system is astounding. It appears that the relationship between MS-OS-revisions and maturity is "Maturity = ln(revision number)", where the function ln is the natural logarithm. After the upgrade to Vista, the only need to upgrade further (other than aesthetics) will be to reduce power consumption with efficient hardware, which itself will take on an exponential relationship.
The only place I still see bloat in the MS machine is in the active directory, and this isn't PC based, its network based...
Does it go on forever?