Special report: Who pays for recycling hardware?
Published: 18 Jun 2001 14:03 BST
A growing movement to recycle PCs and other electronics has government groups from King County, Washington, to the European Parliament examining ways to keep those machines from ending up in landfills and posing pollution threats.
Computer makers worry that government solutions focused on redesign, recycling and disposal will raise the expense of doing business -- and the price tags of their products -- at a time when they can ill afford such costly changes.
Regardless of how it gets done, some form of wide-scale recycling appears inevitable. The computer industry acknowledges that its products are becoming obsolete faster than it is putting new machines on the market -- leading businesses and consumers to store tons of aging equipment until agreement can be reached on a way to dispose of them without doing grave harm to the world's environment
Once a week, a truck stops at a facility run by the Public Service Enterprise Group in the New Jersey town of Paulsboro, in the US, loaded with desktop computers, laptops, fax machines, photocopiers, television sets and video recorders.
Many of the computers will be fully refurbished, getting clean hard drives, repaired motherboards, and even some elbow grease to wipe away unsightly smudges. The remaining hardware that is deemed unsalvageable will be dismantled for parts: plastic will be smelted, lead and zinc reclaimed, gold and silver extracted.
"For all our waste, there is no waste," said Gary Wohler, investment recovery specialist of Public Service Enterprise. Last year, the energy services company recycled 766 computers, 814 monitors and 31 printers this way.
It is a telling sign that a truck loaded with expensive electronics is working for the sake of environmentalism in a place like New Jersey -- home to the "Sopranos" and a state not widely known for its ecological sensitivities. But New Jersey is one of a handful of states with an activist bent, putting increasing pressure on electronics makers to address what some circles see as a worldwide environmental threat. And Wohler's company is one of many that has discovered recycling religion.
Two decades after becoming perhaps the most indispensable fixture of the modern workplace, the personal computer is confronting an ugly and unavoidable truth: As with all other electronic devices powering the Information Age, it will eventually end up like any other product -- in the garbage heap. In fact, watchdog groups say PCs are going out of service faster than they are being produced.
"Most of these things are still sitting on shelves or in warehouses," said Jeffrey Tumarkin, team leader at the Environmental Protection Agency's WasteWise program, which has some 1,100 participants, from Anheuser Busch and Eastman Kodak to corner shops, schools and local authorities. "For companies that have thousands, it's a huge issue."
Regulators, corporations and environmental groups around the globe are struggling to decide how to dispose of a seemingly endless supply of PCs and who should be held responsible for keeping tons of hazardous waste out of the environment. Although concerns over discarded computers have been voiced for years, the debate is coming to a head with the threat -- and increasing actuality -- of government action worldwide.
State and national governments and environmental groups are pointing to PC makers to take responsibility. But companies argue that their counterparts in other industries, such as automakers, are not held similarly accountable for their junked products. Moreover, the issue could not come at a worse time for computer hardware manufacturers, which have been squeezed by eroding profit margins and an overall slowdown in the technology industry.
Legislation pending in the European Union, for instance, "would be very costly," said John Minter, environmental affairs representative at Dell Computer. "Somehow, manufacturers would be incurring that cost."
As the debate continues, the pile of old PCs keeps growing. The National Safety Council estimates that, in 2002 alone, the number of PCs becoming obsolete will outrun the number of new PCs hitting the market by some 3.4 million. Overall, the EPA estimates, computers and other electronic equipment account for about 220 million tons of waste per year in the United States.
And volume is only the beginning of the ecological issues posed by decaying PCs. The machinery also contains elements like lead, mercury and arsenic that can be classified as hazardous waste.
"We are talking about some real potential problems," said H. Scott Matthews, research director in the Green Design Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.
Given such important health issues, government agencies and environmental groups say their main concern is with proper disposal, an issue that defies easy solutions. Once the machines are past the point of being resold in corporate garage sales or donated to charitable groups, that means recycling -- separating the raw materials to be processed for reuse -- and containing hazardous materials.
Click here to go to Part II of our Recycling Special Report: First steps to cleaner computing.
See ZDNet UK's NetBuyer guide to recycling PCs -- complete with details of useful organisations that can help.
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