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88% of Electronics Exports Reused, Not Dumped
retroworks writes "Greenercomputing.com staff covered a study which sheds more light on the controversial practice of exporting used computer equipment overseas. University of Arizona professors Ramzy Kahhat and Eric Williams newly published research, Product or Waste? Importation and End-of-Life Processing of Computers in Peru apparently confirms what WR3A.org says in the Video 'Fair Trade Recycling'. Namely, that most of the exports of used computers imported by buyers overseas (88%) are really for reuse and repair. Otherwise, people would not pay to import them. This bolsters pro-export arguments made in a scholarly article by Charles Schmidt of NIH in 2006. Perhaps what is needed to stem e-waste pollution is not a ban on exports, but for more people to export, so that buyers have more choice of (ethical) suppliers. Put another way: If used computer exports are outlawed, only outlaws will export used computers."
Has pretty strict rules on importing some items. When I worked for an electronics shop repairing TVs in the 90s we sold all of our scrap TVs to a Hispanic gentleman who would take them to Mexico and strip them of usable parts then sell them. He could do this with scrap televisions but could not do it with any part for a computer as those were even more restricted.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
In many cases it goes even further than that. In large deployments, you get to the point where(because of a combination of cost of employee downtime, cost of IT tech time, cost of parts/replacements[if you are trying to maintain a consistent system across an organization, rather than merely equivalent specs, these often don't get much cheaper over time]) it becomes attractive to just toss all the machines of a given age, in case they break. This is one of the attractions behind a 3 year or 5 year automatic replacement cycle.
That leaves you with gigantic piles of machines that aren't broken at all, just no longer a good organizational fit.
I can't imagine these are actually getting "repaired" insomuch that they are likely taking good parts from many broken machines and making good ones from them.
Probably mostly true, although I've seen people throw away 'broken' computers where the only problem was that Windows was infected with too much spyware. I've also seen machines where one of the motherboard cables has come loose, or the PSU has blown a fuse, being discarded as not worth the effort of fixing. These machines are easy to repair, if you can be bothered.
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Arizona has two universities, the Tucson based University of Arizona (UofA), which has been around for much longer than the Tempe based Arizona State University (ASU). This article was written by people at latter, not the former, so the post attribution is incorrect.