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."

Comments

makes sense to me

[gurps_npc]

Most of the time the reason we don't fix something is that it costs more to pay someone to repair it then it does to buy something new. I.E. Man hours are expensive.

But there are lots of places where man hours are a lot cheaper. In a third world country, where they can get the electronics at a per ton cost, it is probably cheaper to pay someone to fix the stuff.

Not to mention the high black market value of the financial information left on hard drives whose power supply broke so no one bothered to delete them (if they even thought about it.)

Re:makes sense to me

[TheRealMindChild]

Well, sort of. Back when we were playing Zork with our EGA Video cards, we didn't have 7 layer PCBs with IC so tight that I would need a million dollar robot to replace. But nowadays, computer components (or really, electronics in general) are just not repairable, even if you wanted to.

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.

Re:makes sense to me

[Opportunist]

I guess it's more "consumer replacable parts" repairs. I.e. find the broken part (is it the CPU? The mainboard? The power supply? The ram?) and replace with spare parts from other boxes that are equally "broken", but at different parts.

Most of the time it's economically unfeasible to repair a 3 year old computer. We are simply too expensive to tinker and toy with it. Ship the broken boxes over to where manpower doesn't cost anything, compared to the parts.

Re:makes sense to me

[Larryish]

Yep, and you can get them cheap, by the pallet even.

Me and a friend picked up 5 P4 boxes from a local defense contractor, minus memory and hard drives, for the price of $0 (we just had to go pick them up).

Put a half gig of memory and a 40 gig hard drive in each of the 2 that were in marketable condition and sold them for $100 apiece locally.

After roughly 4 hours total, between picking the machines up, eBay for some cheap memory and storage, doing a quick install using the COA numbers on the case stickers. and listing them in the Buy/Sell, our numbers were like so:

Total cost to us: ~$45 and 4 hours

Total profit: ~$155

Re:makes sense to me

[hughbar]

So, we're driven by our unreasoning worship of numbers to throw away viable stuff that used a lot of resources and energy to produce. Some of the resources are non-renewables so the value can't really be captured by numbers either.

I live in a poor borough in London. I'm currently trying to Linux-install and re-use computers that are pushed into planned obsolescence by Windows product cycles. These computers are 'good' usually for another 5 years. I was born in the 50s, after the WW2 and our culture has a different (and to my mind, saner) attitude to repairing stuff, too.

And what happens after that?

[Lead Butthead]

What happens after that? To where do they get... 'exported' again once they are... 'retired' in those third world country? It's very likely that electronics disposal regulations in those third world countries are nearly as strict as they should be. So really what then?

Re:And what happens after that?

[Dutch Gun]

What happens after that? To where do they get... 'exported' again once they are... 'retired' in those third world country? It's very likely that electronics disposal regulations in those third world countries are nearly as strict as they should be. So really what then?

Computers actually have a pretty long shelf-life if you don't count technological obsolescence. It doesn't mean that an older computer won't be useful for someone, but not as much in a 1st world country, where the cost of obsolescence has outstripped the costs and advantages up relatively frequent upgrades. For example, obsolete systems can be more prone to security vulnerabilities, as they aren't being actively maintained as new exploits are discovered. And with a secondary market, a lot of those 'toxic' components can be pulled out and re-used again.

By helping these countries advance in technological prowess, we'll be helping them out of 3rd world status. Wealthier nations tend to be more concerned with the environment. People tend not to care as much about the environment when they're barely making enough to buy food, let alone a computer. It's the same as with the population issue in many ways. The population explosion is leveling off in many developed nations. In undeveloped nations, the reproduction rate is still absurdly high.

The logical answer, it's always seemed to me, is to focus efforts on getting the rest of the world up to speed economically, not to impose our morals and guidelines like lords and masters from on high. A lot of these problems will be easier to solve once people around the world aren't still starving to death.

Re:And what happens after that?

[couchslug]

[quote] All the used computers in the world won't help if the people don't have the freedom and capitalistic opportunity to leverage them. [/quote]

If you didn't have "freedom" and "capitalistic opportunity", would you prefer to be with or without a computer?

Re:And what happens after that?

[shutdown -p now]

If you subscribe to the theory that freedom, human rights etc always grow as economy grows, all's well and good. Me, I always remember about Nazi Germany.

Re:And what happens after that?

[number11]

What happens if you get "the rest of the word" up to speed economically to the level where they can compete with us - and note that economic competitiveness implies military capability - and it turns out that their morals are diametrically opposite to ours (e.g., "Behead all those who insult Islam!", as written on the sign of one Muslim protester)?

You mean, as opposed to those people whose morals are "like ours"? Maybe the military officer who "made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans"? Or forum posts like "Damn Ragheads! We need to simply kill everyone in fuggin Iraq!"? Or "Reaper", the Brit who says "I like to Kill Haji's, they disgust me"? Yep, them Christians and Americans and Brits sure are some peace lovin' people, morally far superior to Muslims.

Lots of usable tech hitting the dumpster....

[ZosX]

It amazes me how many people throw away perfectly good equipment because windows is running slow, or the drive is crashed, so they think that the whole machine doesn't work anymore. People cannot differentiate between operating system health and hardware health. Also a lot of older tech that is getting phased out is still perfectly usable with windows xp. Even a lowly P4 2ghz isn't all that bad for just web surfing. I was thinking about the rate of PC platform development lately, and it seems to me that the innovation rate is slowing down. Perhaps this is due to there being one single platform (x86) now, but doesn't it seem like things moved so much faster forward in the 90s? I mean we went from 8-bit processors to 32-bit risc monsters on the desktop in like 10 years. Asides from faster busses and dual processors and (finally) 64-bit addressing, how much further have we really come? All these people are reusing 10 year old tech because it still runs today's software (2d software at least) and that isn't something you could say 10 years ago, and that is my point.

Re:Lots of usable tech hitting the dumpster....

[bondiblueos9]

Even a lowly P4 2ghz isn't all that bad for just web surfing.

He calls a P4 2ghz lowly, but a P4 2ghz is my main computer. Upgraded a couple months ago from a P3 1ghz. And no, it isn't all the bad for web surfing.

Re:Lots of usable tech hitting the dumpster....

[PaintyThePirate]

GGP does have a point though. An 8 year old computer is still mostly capable of modern computing needs: surfing the internet, sending email, word processing, etc. On the other hand, a computer from 1991 was not quite as useful in 1999. That would be a 486 in the world of Pentium IIIs (well, IIIs were getting common by then anyway).

Re:Lots of usable tech hitting the dumpster....

[TheRaven64]

I mean we went from 8-bit processors to 32-bit risc monsters on the desktop in like 10 years

Because there was a compelling reason to. Most 8-bit processors used some banked arrangement of memory that let them access a 16-bit address space, giving them 64KB of RAM. I write articles which are 10-20KB of text. This fits in a 64KB address space, but doesn't leave much room for the text editor. Add in some markup and it's easy to go beyond a 16-bit address space. Most 16-bit processors, similarly, had a scheme for accessing more than a 16-bit address space. The 8086 could access a 20-bit space, for example, letting it address an entire megabyte. Want to do some video editing? 640x480 image with an 8-bit palette is going to use a third of that. Put the same image in 24-bit color and it's taken almost all of your RAM. Move to a 32-bit processor and you get 4GB of address space. With an MMU, that's 4GB per process, maybe some hackery like PAE so you get up to 64GB of physical RAM. What can you do with 4GB of address space? You're very unlikely to generate enough text to fill that up; even the whole of Project Gutenberg isn't much bigger than that, and you don't need all of it in RAM at once. Images? Not likely. High-end cameras use about 50MB per image and they're already past the point where the human eye can take in the whole image at once. Video maybe? DV footage is about 10GB/hour, but generally you don't map it all into your address space, you process it in a stream, so it's also not limited by a 32-bit address space.

It would be a mistake to say a 32-bit address space is enough for anyone, just as it was a mistake to say 64KB is enough for anyone. That doesn't mean, however, that 64KB isn't enough for some people. 1MB is enough for a few more people. 4GB is enough for quite a lot of people. 16 Exabytes is probably enough for almost everyone. Note that most '64-bit' processors really only allow something like 48 bits of virtual address space and 40 bits of physical because no one - even the NSA - is using the whole 64-bit space.

It's the same thing with processor speeds. Why do you think things like ARM and Atom chips, which are much slower than the top-of-the-line i7, POWER5, or whatever, are becoming so popular? Because, for a very large section of the market, a 1GHz P3 is fast enough for everything they do. A few months ago my 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro was in for repair, so I was using my old 1.5GHz G4 PowerBook instead. Most of the time, the CPU load on that machine was under 60%. The only difference with the faster machine is that now the average CPU load is closer to 10%. For some people 1MHz was fast enough. For more people 100MHz was fast enough. For a lot of people, 1GHz was fast enough. For some people, 100THz will still be too slow, but they are quite a small niche market (and SGI is very pleased that they are still willing to pay a large markup).