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

Mexico

[mrmeval]

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.

Re:Mexico

[rohan972]

What I am curious about is why a Spaniard is allowed to do so in Mexico. That's more curious than dubious restrictions on import.

What I am curious about is why you bring this up when he didn't mention a Spaniard.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Hispanic

Re:Mexico

[Anonymous Coward]

That is/was an issue regarding tariffs and the market for repair parts. In the first place, import computing equipment (at the retail level) is subject to a 100% duty. In the second place, the market for computing equipment just isn't the same as it is here in the US.

Generic electronic equipment (televisions and such) are not subject to similarly high duties, especially if they are non-functional, and there is a much larger after market for televisions than computers.

The duties applied have less to do with environmental restrictions and more to do with the perception (by the Camera de Diputatos and the Mexican Senate) that computers in the hands of consumers are luxury items.

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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:makes sense to me

[JWSmythe]

    There's actually a really good market here in the states for "recycled" electronics. I know a big company who buys lots (like pallet fulls, not just a large quantity) from gov't auctions, and sometimes they're simply contracted by the government to haul off the equipment. They're perfectly good working units. They sell them through their store, and on eBay. What they can't sell because they're broken, they break down to components, and then have some 3rd parties that break them down more for precious metals.

    They're SUPPOSE to wipe all sensitive information. I have received routers that were still configured for government agencies and large businesses. I don't know how they ever made it out the door of the original facilities, but they did. I've bought some really nice, and previously really expensive, equipment for real cheap. Sometimes some doesn't work quite right, but I'd say I have a >90% success rate with it.

    Those shops never test them though, so I buy untested, and absorb my losses. BTW, if anyone needs a nice Cisco 5005, I have one sitting in the garage that needs a good home. :) I swapped it out for a Cisco WS-C2980G because it took up less space and less power. :) That, and I have 3 working spare 2980G's in case the first breaks. :)

    They also sell lots of hard drives, but what would I do with 1,000 untested (i.e., not formatted) 80Gb drives, besides pilfer them for information? :) Nah, I have better things to do with my time.

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

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:makes sense to me

[Mprx]

Electrolytic capacitor failure is still a problem. The famous industrial espionage incident with the incomplete electrolyte recipe is in the past, but manufacturers still try to save money with barely adequate capacitors that won't stand up to high temperatures or dirty power. They can usually be replaced by hand soldering.

Re:makes sense to me

[JWSmythe]

Creative Recycling

    http://crserecycling.com/

    eBay seller ID: bargain_crh

    eBay store: http://stores.shop.ebay.com/Bargain-Computer-Products

Re:makes sense to me

[Falconhell]

And yet in the last few years I did a lot of replacing capacitors on motherboards.

I'm not saying it was easy, but it was possible.

Re:makes sense to me

[mikael]

I've patched up my favorite laptop over five times now - replaced the LCD, upgraded the HDD, replaced the cooling fan assembly, upgraded the memory and replaced a circuit board that switched the LCD off. Each time it's been cheaper than buying a new laptop. Sending the machine away would have taken two weeks, cost at least a 200 pound service charge plus the price of marked up components, not forgetting the cost of return and delivery. Otherwise, just buying the parts and swapping them out just costs far less. Finding where to buy the spare parts was the hardest part.

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

[crazybit]

I live in Peru and I can tell you:

1. Most of that imported hardware being sold here are COMPLETE computers (working CPU + keyboard + mouse / monitor for an additional price) after fixing bumps and scratches.
2. Many of those "used" computers are equal or more powerful than an average ATOM and is being sold at 200 - 300 US$ (new netbooks go for 400+ US$). They are mainly used for people who want internet access and doing their school/university assignments.
3. The useful spare parts (memory, processors, DVD's, keyboards and mouse) are sold for CHEAP (new 160 Gb. SATA is about 65US$, used 80 Gb is about 20 US$ - used IBM keyboards go for 3.5 US$, same price for used IBM / Compaq / HP mouses).

Considering we don't have newegg.com prices here, getting a working computer for 250 US$ so your bugging adolescent siblings can access facebook and messenger is a relief for many many families, and it gives them access to technology.

Re:makes sense to me

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is true and very helpful for people like me who import parts on a very small basis to build cheap computers for schools here in Costa Rica and neighboring Nicaragua. The local rural schools just don't have the funding to buy even one computer for their staff and students to use. Heck! They don't have enough money for books, toilet paper, or soap in the bathrooms so the kids don't keep getting sick! A few of us have a small group who bring parts back with us each time we visit the USA and then use them to build computers or repair defunct computers. And we also donate TP and soap. Books are harder to find than computer parts.

Re:makes sense to me

[mcrbids]

Years ago, I used to have a connection with a recycling company in Sacramento with just this sort of marketplace. I would go down to their warehouse (a few hours drive from my hometown) and pick up a huge truckload of computers right off the pallets. Good deals, too. 3-5 year old computers, monitors, keyboards that had been well treated, for sale as scrap.

I took them to my hometown and made quite a good living reformatting them, putting some spit and polish on them, and selling them as "remanufactured" computers. I offered a generous (90 day) warrantee but honestly, it was rare that I had anybody take me up on it. They were generally high-quality machines that had been well treated so problems were, by far, the exception.

The big deal was making them LOOK nice. For keyboards, I used to use a garden hose, a nylon bristle broom, dish soap, and the sidewalk in front of my house. (which got lots of afternoon sun) I'd squirt dish soap all over the keyboards, spray them down with the hose, and stand over them, brushing them vigorously with the broom. After the grit was all out of them, I'd rinse them profusely with the hose washing out as much of the soap and grit as I could. Then I let them dry for a while. California valley sun is VERY warm, so it only took a day or so.

Surprisingly, some 90% of the keyboards worked perfectly after that, and looked almost new. A hour or so of work and $0.25 of soap would usually result in $200 or so worth of clean, fresh keyboards, otherwise attained at $1 a pop.

O/S software was easy - they often came preloaded with some old corporate software image. If there wasn't a license sticker, I'd just dump the registry for the license key, grab the O/S CD, and 45 minutes later was up and going. (sucked when MS changed their license terms to prevent resale like this!)

Since my margin was about 3:1, I could take the time to see that each system was well tested and stable before I sold. That's not true for many new systems sold, I might add. I actually made more money on the used systems per system than I did the new systems at 4-5x the cost!

Of course, this was back when a "new" computer STARTED at $1,500. I saw the writing on the wall when the purchase price dipped under $1,000, right around Y2K, and sold out. There's just no market for used computers in the 'states, since labor costs are high and prices are low enough to not be worth it.

But for the 3rd world, this doesn't surprise me at *all*. Computers passed the point of basic usability years ago. Heck, I have a 6 year old laptop that has survived 3 years of my own rigorous use, and has been passed down through 2 other employees since. It still works fine today, I used it to test Windows 7! It plays Hulu/Netflix videos just fine, and even does a passable job with many of the games out today. If it wasn't for running Vista under VMWare, I could still be using it today.

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?

[TheRaven64]

Maybe they're still working? I have a couple of BBCs that still run fine. These were introduced in 1981 and are still useful in some situations. They have a plethora of I/O ports that are very easy to program (I remember using them in design/technology classes to control various bits of electronics) and can drive a TV for display. There's no reason to put them in landfill if they're still doing something useful. You can burn software into ROM for them quite easily and they turn on instantly. A third-world village could, for example, power one from a simple wind turbine and use it to control an automated irrigation system. If they were creating such a thing today then they could probably use better hardware (although you'd be hard pressed to find a modern machine with such easy-to-program I/O facilities), but if it had been sent out in the '90s when the machines started to be discarded then it could have had almost twenty years of useful second life.

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?

[techno-vampire]

Whenever information spreads, it helps to topple dictators.

You mean the way it just did in Iran? People like to say that free and unfettered access to information is deadly to dictatorships, but there's a remarkable shortage of real-world examples.

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....

[ZosX]

I was stuck on a 1 ghz p3 backup for a month a little while ago. Not bad under ubuntu. Hell I even ran kubuntu on it as it was snappier than gnome. There isn't much you can do with a box like that other than render web pages these days though. You should skim craigslist. I regularly see dual core machines for like $15o-200 right now and you'd be only like a generation or two behind. Nothing wrong with buying 2 year old computers for a decent price.... :)

I finally bought my first new computer ever though. It is easily the fastest machine that I've ever used and its a laptop. :)

dual core athlon64 2ghz, with ddr2 667 ram with hypertransport 3.0 is at least twice as fast as my old single core athlon 64 3000 which also ran at 2ghz.

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).

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

[ztransform]

8-bit processors to 32-bit risc monsters

I think most desktops are now CISC monsters.

Asides from faster busses and dual processors and (finally) 64-bit addressing, how much further have we really come?

Personally I've seen significant development in the last 10 years. Back 12 years ago, when I was at university studying electrical engineering, we were discussing the potential of radio modulation being done entirely in software - what a novel concept that was back then! When the i386 came out I was amazed at things like barrel shifters, and protected memory - protected memory, what a boon that was to multi-process operating systems! Then things got really complicated, with memory register sets for advanced multimedia computations; and chips handling multiple levels of security (now we have the hypervisor).

Whilst the desktop chips were becoming too complex for any single individual to understand (much like the motor car) the embedded chip market also changed.. 32 bits is now common in embedded applications; surface mount components and chips were just entering the market when I left university; now you'd be lucky to ever identify the value of a resister on a circuit board.. circuit boards are rarely a single layer any more.

Ten years ago the recording industry thought it had a monopoly on media distribution and charged us accordingly taking us for the suckers we were. Then the computer industry got smart and the networking industry prevailed. Now we have more lawyers than technicians thinking they have a say in technology.

As far as I'm concerned there's been an enormous amount of development in the last decade, to the point where I believe I can't keep up. I used to know everything I wanted to know about PCs. Now I don't. And I can't be bothered trying to learn as 2-3 years later a new chipset/architecture comes out. I certainly don't want to update my Microsoft operating systems as I'm convinced they will only restrict what I can do (DRM) rather than enhance what I can do.

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

[petermgreen]

now you'd be lucky to ever identify the value of a resister on a circuit board
Well I could probablly lift it off the board with a set of heated tweezers, measure it and then solder it back on, annoying but certainly possible (at least down to 0603 package, probablly smaller).

Also while there are 32 bit embedded processors the 8 bit and 16 bit ones are still availible and afaict are still selling well. For many applications a pic in a dil or soic package on a 2 layer board is plenty and for low volume stuff MUCH cheaper than trying to deal with multi layer boards and/or parts small enough that you need professional assembly (yes it is possible to DIY with TQFP packages but it's not something I'd reccomend)

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

[forkazoo]

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).

For a slightly more extreme comparison, imagine a ten year old computer today, and in 1995.
A ten year old computer would be, like you say, a PIII. 1 GHz for a round number. Not super speedy by modern standards, but stuff it full of RAM and you can do most office type things with it, even using fairly current software. The first machine I used to cut DV footage on was even slower than our 10 year old beast.

But, in 1995, a ten your old computer would basically have been a relic. A 640 k machine with a CGA card being compared to Pentiums running Windows 95. A 128k Mac up against a PowerMac. No real comparison at that point.

There are a couple of reasons why progress seemed so rapid at that point. A lot of technology already existed, and was well understood from high end machines by the 1990's. It just hadn't made it into common PC hardware. OF the things that PC companies did invent, everything was still so new that there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit. Also, transistor budgets were still low enough that it was possible to really exploit new fab process improvements because you could use a modestly sized design team. The market was also expanding very rapidly, so the amount of money that could be used for R+D was exploding in that period. The starting points were so primitive that every little improvement seemed to be huge.

Also, the lack of monoculture prior to about the mid-90's meant that you could try completely new shit. Some of it failed, but somebody always had some crazy idea to push things forward. Then, everybody got email and just needed to be able to open their MS Word attachments. Coming up with a revolutionary non-file-centric storage system is worthless if it can't store an MS Word file. Coming up with a new networking paradigm is useless if it means you can't get your email.

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

[tdelaney]

It's not just the average Mum or Dad. Sometimes us techies can't diagnose it's a problem with the hard disk either.

Case in point - my sister's computer (that I had built for her) was spontaneously crashing. The problem appeared to be a PSU issue (it had a 5-year-old 300W Antec PSU). Swapping out the PSU though didn't help - one (crappy) PSU it wouldn't post with, another it would spontaneously crash, etc.

I swapped out everything I had spares of, but couldn't diagnose the problem. Suspecting a motherboard problem, I eventually advised replacing the internals (they were starting to do things that would benefit from a CPU upgrade).

Several months later (after they'd moved house) their new machine started doing the same thing, and then started refusing to POST. Only three components had been transferred to the new machine - the case, the optical drive and the hard drive. Turns out that the hard drive spindle had become clogged with concrete dust (from their concrete floor) and was partially seizing up, making it use more and more voltage, and eventually tripping the hard drive. Finally it totally seized, causing the refusal to POST.

Never got the data from the hard drive, but their old machine is happily running as my test machine. I've even run an HD4870 in there (troubleshooting for a co-worker), off the old 300W PSU ...

The question is... How is it recycled?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out this disturbing CBC video short documentary on how these people dismantle computers in the most unhealthy way. Both to themselves and their environment.

http://www.cbc.ca/national/blog/video/environmentscience/ewaste_dumping_ground.html

Truer than you realize

[localroger]

I use a nearly 10 year old PC at work as my disposable net-connected computer (we have an air gap between our real network and the internets). It's a 333 MHz P2 and running Win2K and FireFox it runs fine, as long as I don't try to use it to watch video. I use it for all of my at-work email, lots of word processing, and viewing and printing PDF's. I also use it to run circuit board design software so I can submit the images over the net to producers.

ASU not UofA

[bbk]

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.

My 2 Cents

[sendro]

I have seen the EOL recycling process first hand - I have been out to the warehouses and purchased networking & server equipment. It is great that we can recycle this stuff. The issue here is 88% of your "secure data" will end up back on the market exported to India. Do you trust these people with your data - every server I have purchased from these recycling companies has still had your valuable data on it. If you are a company sending your old IT stock to these places.. sure you have agreements to wipe your data; but does it actually happen??? No! The techs at these places have no idea how to format a SAN array or server drives.. now your data is shipped overseas and in the hands of the worst possible people you could imagine. It makes me sick to the stomach as a Linux Administrator.. but its true. If any corporations read this; I suggest you get an insider to purchase from where you dump your equipment and you will find all your data still on the disks.. what is the point of have network security when this happens? ... there is no point at all. I swear this is the shocking truth about the recycling business; and you people wonder how all these people get your personal details.. it is good recycling - but companies should take it in their hands to ensure the data is destroyed. Drill a hole through each drive then let them take your ex lease equipment away.

Re:What about copyright infringement on software?

[Orion Blastar]

Actually the older the software, the easier it is to make copies and put it on multiple machines. Once the software reaches online activation, it cannot be copied so easily without beating the activation scheme.

Anyway as it turns out Microsoft is giving away free downloads of MS-Word 5.5 for MS-DOS so that old systems can run it for free. The direct download link is here in EXE self extraction format. It is the Y2K fix for MS-Word for DOS 5.5 and under and released as a new version instead of a patch or update. Microsoft felt that releasing a full DOS version would be easier than update older versions of MS-Word for DOS going back to Word 1.0 and up to 5.5. So those still using DOS or looking for a DOS word processor can take advantage of MS-Word 5.5 for DOS for free.