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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[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....

[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).

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

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.