hardware recycling

[Evan Leibovitch]

Dave Mason wrote:
>> "Bleeding heart donors" may feel good about having "done something,"
>> but it doesn't make it great economics.
>
>> Arguably the same could be said about _most_ recycling programs.
>>     
>
> ...if you consider no economic cost for enviromental degradation.
>   

Unfortunately, the resources used to provide the energy used in
recycling (to drive the plants) and the necessary chemicals are often
rarely evaluated for _their_ degradation costs when calculating the
relative merits of various approaches. Sometimes (often?) a recycling
effort can waste more resources than it reclaims.

> Neither the manufacture nor the disposal of most electronic equipment are particularly green!
Sending old computers to other countries can also be seen as a form of
'disposal', even if they're functional. While there's some good to be
had in finding new uses for old computers, eventually they will be
unusable, and the nasty task of reducing that equipment into components
that can be buried, burned, decomposed or recycled becomes Someone
Else's Problem.

Unfortunately, waste reduction is a field dominated as much by emotion
as fact; and one of the predominant emotions is guilt. Sending old PCs
to developing countries accomplishes some good for the recipient, but
that good is likely far outweighed by that of the senders who are
enabled to alleviate multiple forms of guilt. The tax deduction doesn't
hurt, either.

I don't think that anyone has really crunched the numbers to determine
the total value and cost of sending old PCs to the developing world (as
opposed to developing cheaper ones to buy new). I suspect that the
numbers would gore a few sacred cows.

>   So it behooves us to make as much use of them as possible.  That said, there is a point at which greater power
> consumption of older systems, and potentially worse disposal practices (although that's fairly hard to imagine)
It's easy to imagine. There are areas of China that have destroyed the
local water supply for generations because of the chemicals used to
extract precious metals from circuit boards and other IT parts.

- Evan

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