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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."
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."
Yep, case in point - I gave someone a quote of £175 to fix their laptop. They preferred instead to spend £339 on a new one. Even if the cost is lower for repairs people still prefer to buy new (which doesn't make much sense to me).
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Ironically, the EU regulation RoHS (which is intended to cut down on hazardous materials in electronics) is likely to make the waste problem worse - since it bans solder with lead in it. Lead free solder is quite inferior to leaded solder - it tends to be more brittle, and tin whiskers are more likely to form. This means electronics using lead-free solder will fail more frequently and earlier, and therefore need to be replaced more frequently, increasing the volume of waste - and probably more than negating the intended effect of RoHS in the first place.
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It's somewhat ironic at a time when governments such as Britain's are pressuring their citizens to be ecologically responsible and do their part, when at the same time they are just taking their issues and hiding them 'under the carpet to say'. Especially when MEDC countries are pressuring the developing countries in order to lower their economical aspirations in order to be environmentally aware ("Meanwhile the British leader is likely to raise the issue of global warming, and what developing countries like India can do to help tackle it." at the BBC). Seems to me as when the developed world is pushing on one front in order to gain public support and more education towards global warming, behind the backs of this they are just doing the same as usual in order to get rid of problems that would require investment, something we should be ashamed of.
Business Voyeur
Hello, my name is Robert Johnson and I have recently come to aquire 10,000,000 computers that I need to smuggle out of the country...
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.
By the time we've filled up Africa, things will have warmed up enough to provide us the whole new continent of Antarctica for dumping.
I always wondered what happened to the spam emails after I deleted them. Now I finally know where they end up.
So they bring their used laptop to you for a repair. You charge £175. As with virtually every other device and piece of machinery out there, it'll likely break down more frequently as it ages. Soon enough, they'll be paying you another £175 to repair it when some other part breaks. And finally something else will eventually go, perhaps costing another £175. So they've spent £525 repairing what is likely by now a slow, underperforming system.
They'd be stupid not to spend £339 on a new system, especially when it comes to laptops. A difference of a year can mean a two- or three-fold performance improvement. Plus they'll likely experience a longer period of time before the next failure. So it's no wonder they'll pay £339 for a new system, rather than paying £525 for repairs (over and above the original purchase price).
It's just simple economics, lad.
Thanks to all the hard drives ending up in hands of 401 scammers!$#$!#@!!
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).
It's not just e-waste. As this piece notes, the toxic byproducts of manufacturing are being dumped as raw materials too: The Global Village's Septic Tank
Companies should be forced to include, with your electronics purchase, two small parts likely to fail early.
and seen countries come and go regarding taking it on the chin for the US consumer byproduct/waste. First it was indeed our own backyard landfills, then we got 'smart' and taxed heavy or disallowed it in the mid to late 90s. Then it went off to Mexico, in the form of used crap being sold to uneducated folks in Mexico for top dollar when the markets began to collapse in the 99-01 timeframe. Then it started to head off (monitors in particular) to China. Then they got wise, and also stopped allowing big electronic trash ships to dock at all and unload, basically causing a huge bottleneck at their ports and off the coasts. Now it is Africa, doesn't suprise me at all if next it is Antartica when folks realize what this stuff does to the ground waters. Its hilarious that folks are so shocked at this capitalism at its worst with monitors and heavy metals from electronic consumerism. Steve Jobs, you should be ashamed of yourself. :)
Maybe when the space shuttles are ready to be retired we can load them up with old electronics and fly them for their last journey into the sun.
We should start making electronic materials editable, much like candy underwear. But not make them much more delicious than dirt like army candy bars. Perhaps make it like tofu, so that it will take the taste of what your are eating it will.
:)
On the other hand, I am studying software engineering right now, I hope when I graduate I don't have management actually try to make me make something like this.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
the gases...that make up a lot of electronics are particularly harmful for the environment
Yet another good reason not to let out the magic smoke.
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.
When you don't have enough money to eat every day, the prospect that some point removed from your house has, egads, gasses and metals at it doesn't seem quite as frightening. The nations of Africa, like many before them, will start caring about environmentalism when they have a high enough standard of living for it to be a pressing concern. China is starting to get greener as their economy improves (note "greener": they're still dirty, but if you were there 15 years ago you would be amazed people could live in their cities), and many late industrializing countries (Japan, Taiwan, etc) have high levels of environmental consciousness (I hate that word, incidentally) after decades of less-than-Greenpeace-approved actions taken to bolster their economies.
Incidentally, the other reason the whole "We'll take your junk if you pay us for it" works is that NIMBY-ites in rich Western democracies don't want the stuff anywhere near them, so they pay to have it dumped somewhere far out of sight. Then the same folks cluck-cluck about how we're exploiting the Third World.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I'm not sure why this is such a guilt trip, though it is tragic. Low-cost manufacturing contries produce massive volumes of merchandise with poor environmental controls. And many of us in the high-cost world have lost our jobs because of this.
Furthermore, I think it is somewhat appropriate that the junk returns to where it was produced (I would say the same of any North American or European state as well). It can be argued that the undereducated poor in the East and South do not understand what they are getting themselves into - but certainly the leaders of those countries do understand, even if they do not care.
So, in China the poor working class suffers from the "cut corners" manufacturing practices there, at the same time as we suffer job loss here. Who are the guilty ones?
Just think about the impact MS Vista and Office-2007 are going to have on e-waste. If you want the new MS bloat code with the almost as good as MAC interface, then you are going to need (minimum) a 64-bit processor, liquid cooled video card, and 2GB of RAM. Africa needs to brace for the boat load of PIII's and low-end P4's about to show up.
It's really sick that modern computers have such extreme processing power relative to 20-years ago, yet we must continue to upgrade.
...maybe people would think about it a little bit more.
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
Personally, I have found it extremely difficult to recycle my own old computer parts and whatnot. Being that my father is a modder and builds himself a completely new system every 2-3 years, we have quite a few spare parts lying around. For the most part, we've kept them (and we are definitely becoming quite the computer museum!) around the house, but I'm sure that if there were some easier way to recycle our old parts, we would do that. I tried this past summer to recycle some old computer parts that I had and found it incredibly difficult to a) find a place that accepted old parts and b) find a place that would take my parts for free. No wonder people are just giving them to anyone who will get rid of the parts (even if they're just tossing them into landfills in Africa). Also.... this is probably a stupid question, but should I be worried about the decomposition of the old parts we have lying about the house?
..in rich nations...and costs very little in poor nations that manufacture them. That's the real reason why it's cheaper to buy a new one. Face it, globalization is basically a system invented by rich countries to replace colonialism and slavery. Ignoring the transfer of money, and just looking at the work and goods that people make and receive, the poor countries are basically slaves to the rich countries.
The poor countries would be better off forming their own economic bloc and trading amongst themselves.
This seems like more ill-informed coverage, which makes me question other elements in the article.
Maybe we're recycling our old antique radios and thermostats too?
I thought one of the greatest hazards (at least for the equipment recycled in Asia, rather than Africa) was the toxic out-gassing when people attempted to recover precious metals from the assemblies using blow torches.
Since the fucking tools in Redmond are shoving ever more bloated crap at us requiring us to replace our hardware ever more frequently why the hell don't governments charge Microsoft that recycling tax instead of pushing the problem down on the consumer who has no other choice. I for one am sick as shit listening to people tell me it's my problem.
How do you tell which electronics had a deposit paid on them?
A form? A stamp on the device itself? I suspect documenting either would be cumbersome for the recycling authority you allude to. Ensuring that such documentation is available at the time of refund would probably fall on the consumer, who probably threw the fucking form out with the box it came in. The consumer's kid could peel off the stamp.
However, the key issue is that fundemental difference between computers and disposable containers. There are few people that buy bottles and keep them for longer than the day they make their grocery list. People buy computers forever -- they're a capital good.
Instead, we should follow the refridgerator model. Sears brings by your new refridgerator to replace the old one. The installer says "Hey, man; you want me to get that thing out of your hair or do you want to take it to the dump yourself? We'll recycle it." You think to yourself "That's a damn good point. Shit, this damn thing is heavy as hell: how the fuck am I gonna get this thing in my car?" You just ask how much and who to write the check to.
Where am I going with this? I suggest we make computers too big to leave on the street and too awkward to take to the dump.
(Ottawa) Computer Recyclers (It takes a bit of clicking around, and it's just a small site, but you get the idea)
They (safely) dispose at a cost of $0.68/lb for the public, and $0.50/lb for army (I guess that's because army stuff is that much heavier?)
One main difference between man-made items and natural items is that the latter has a natural mechanism for returning to its original state. Consider a tree struck by lightning. The tree falls to the ground and decomposes back into the soil -- returning to the original molecules that once formed the tree.
You made me think of a couple of points which I found relevant. First of all, laptop (shell)s have been made out of natural materials, but until we can do something like grow a wet laptop -- grow it out of meat instead of a lithographic metal melted way, we're not going to see many laptops built with materials that are going to rot naturally. Then again, I think I'd hate to see some of the viruses that attack biological computing devices. Eeew.
And as far as decomposing naturally, we could digest or process the resulting materials into some raw materials. THis is a bit beyond doing at home, I think. You'd macerate what you could, and dump it into a chamber, and perform a range of reactions on the materials -- you'd need to seperate things, cook others, melt some, and mix whatever is left with someething else, and repeat the process. Sewage is a great semi fluid which would be perfect for the task.
You do need a big facility, and from the scope of this kind of recycling (where it would be feasable with today's primitive New Jersey-styled refining techniques), laptops would be one of many types of electronic devices you'd want to reclaim materials from.
And this is what freaks me out about coal plants dumping CO2 into the air -- isn't that a raw material? Ignore the environmental issues, but they're dumping a potential product into the trash. Same thing with other types of waste -- nuclear included. There's a way to refine everything into something useful.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
The technology I think has been stabilizing, each new processor/component doesn't introduce the user visible performance leap its predecessor did. The changes are more incremental now, and older machines have longer lives before they are outpaced by the demands of software (and I have a feeling a lot of those demands aren't really necessary, but that's another issue). Rather than making cheap disposable boxes, I would advocate a return to engineering for durability, robustness, and future proofing (many older machines are built like tanks - I prefer that durable approach to computers personally. My IBM PS/2 keyboard is probably 20 years old, but still works like a champ. There is no excuse for keyboards that don't last - it is a solved problem and the evidence is out there.) Start to make a big deal about 5 or 10 year warranties on computers, and convince the public that they SHOULD be able to use this machine for that period of time. (First of course you must design and build a machine that is actually a reasonable machine to use for such a period, but I doubt that is an insurmountable obstacle - open hardware projects might help.)
Vista's longevity has actually helped consumers I think, because it broke the whole "upgradeupgradeupgrade" mantra that had come before it and provided some real product stability. I doubt this was the original intent, but I'm glad it happened. Perhaps consumer expectations for stability and robustness can be increased, and we can start to engineer operating systems, standards, and APIs that are intended to be bulletproof and last for decades or even centuries.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
1. Get the lcd inverter of your laptop to break
2. Go to your neighborhood store so they screw you for $400. Enjoy the ride or buy a new laptop, discarding the old one (unless you really know that the inverter is broken).
Also.... this is probably a stupid question, but should I be worried about the decomposition of the old parts we have lying about the house?
The main threat from dumping electronics is the toxic chemicals that leech out of them and into the ground water. So old computers stored in your house, so long as they are kept dry, should be harmless.
I've been reading a lot about India's growing role in the business of electronic scavenging and recycling. Seems that this Asian country with the enormous population and booming e-economy tries to find new uses from obsolete equipment. Read here: http://www.physorg.com/news67098899.html
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
Speaking of which, yes, Penn & Teller did do an episode debunking the "landfill conspiracy". 2nd season, I think.
Most problems are political, not practical.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This is strange, how some country dare to take their e-waste to Africa? At Finland we have a e-waste recycling system that allows you to take your old electronic devices for free to almost any store that sells electronic devices. Getting rid of junk is free and will be always handled properly (like transport to africa ;).
I don't know about selenium, but mercury is in the lamp that lights your lcd, unless it is a xenon lamp.
If you were digging a mine and hit a vein of old computers, wouldn't you think of it as good ore?
Commercial silver and gold deposits are measured in ounces per ton. Commercial copper stays in production at 2% and companies seem to consider a find of 0.13% worth reporting. Plastics would be a problem but then you always have tailings from a mine. Now imagine that the ore doesn't require digging, and in fact people will deliver it to you and pay you to take it.
The cost of labour is a much greater factor than environmental controls. I haven't heard of manufacturing industry moving to Africa, nor have I seen a monitor made in Nigeria.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
AC makes an excellent point here. Eventually most things ever manufactured will be measured by their disposal cost. Right now disposal costs = cost to haul and dig a hole where it should consider both the cost to break it down and reuse as well as the environmental cost when it isn't fully recycled. Too bad AC's post is buried so far down in this discussion. This merits it's own post and discussion.
I get them from there :)
Indeed. We've done that over 100 times this year. Fix and clean, install a usable OS, add a printer, and give them to kids who couldn't otherwise afford one.
Doing homework and surfing the web doesn't take the latest and greatest hardware. Usually, maxing out the memory and installing a NON-VIRUS-LADEN OS does the trick.
This is exactly why I sneak all my electronic bits into some company's dumpster, or break it apart to the point it is not obvious to the garbage guys and mix it with my coffee grounds and so on.
That way, the poluting elements stay in landfills in 1st world countries where they can be somewhat dealt with. Who knows, maybe some day someone will figure out a way to dig that stuff up, process it and get a pile of various raw materials. They were put in the electronics at some point, so they are used....
Seriously, why pay 30 bucks to "recycle" something that's going to get thrown in the trash anyway. It's just a scam by some cities to punish rich people. All this fuss about lead in monitors when it is LEADED GLASS that has the lead mostly locked away. Nobody fusses when a broken leaded glass wine goblet gets thown out... Plus, big evil computers are the problem, not fourty-million crappy consumer electronics, car parts, or whatever else the regular Joe Sixpack throws out. Throw out a boom box, no biggie, throw out a computer or HD and the local treehugger wench gets all upset.
Until these issues are worked out, I call BS on all of it and will continue to do whatever is easiest. There is NO reason doing the right thing (putting stuff in a place it can be dealt with) should cost me a couple hundred bucks a year.
But I just wonder about how long mankind is going to continue this self destructive throw away mentality.
Please tell me you typed this on your Core 2 Duo with a $500 video card. That would be just perfect.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Ever since I moved to Arizona, I've enjoyed the luxury of actual access to a local dump. I lived in a place where there was - so far as I know - no public access to landfills; you had to pay some licensed, mobbed up company to dump anything you wanted to.
Here in Southern Arizona, I pay $9.00 to enter with a pickup truck-load of garbage.
As you enter, to the left, there is a fairly postapocalyptic-looking pile where people can dump refrigerators, stoves, and other appliances - and only those things.
There is an area for dumping oil and paint with large barrels for that purpose.
And then there's a big storage container - the kind you can get on to a tractor trailer - where computer stuff can be dumped. I've often been tempted to scavenge stuff from here but I realize that I don't actually *need* any more spare stuff lying around, which is a weird realization. But I wonder where that stuff goes - the website indicates that it is recycled, but not where.
The pit itself, where you'd dump everything else, is interesting. You drive down and just dump stuff on the ground which feels...naughty. Then, these extremely large tractors come by and plow everything under the dirt, so that each day when you go there, you only see a day's worth of trash.
This contrasts to stuff I've always seen on television with massive piles of unsorted garbage stacked up a story high or more.
For computer equipment, I keep stacking it in my garage as I acquire or want to dispose of dead monitors, old computer parts, and so on. Once per year, around Christmas, I drive down to the dump, pay my $9.00, and dump all of it at once into that storage container allocated for computer equipment.
If you just dump computer stuff in your regular trash, you may want to go to your local landfill's website, and see if they have
After skimming over the summary, I pictured desolate swaths of African wasteland, covered in mounds of expired ethernet packets...
Hold on now. I have upgraded my machine a piece or two at a time for the better part of 10 years now rather than buying a new one. One reason: Pre-packaged machines more often than not come with inferior components, and the ones that come equipped with quality parts are much more pricey (generally) than upgrading to the specifications you want. The majority of people that buy new vs. upgrade (in my opinion) are the kind of people that buy Macs. They don't wish to know how their computer works or how to upgrade a part themselves, or they've been brainwashed by the mass media into thinking they can buy an eMachine and be *cool* or are getting a deal (you know the type . . . they shop at Wal-Mart). The only thing they're getting is ripped off, and all the while they are accomplices in our planets demise.
I thought the CCFL's in the displays used ultra-low mercury content so they were OK for disposal without special remediation? Though, if there are several thousand of them in one spot...