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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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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"