Recently I’ve been really worked up about all these computers in the closet. It’s a bunch of junk.
A bunch of dot-com-bubble bullshit that never needed to be purchased in the first place. I’ve been stressed out about that festering backwater of old computers since I got my job here 16 months ago.
For 16 months, I worried that it would all be super expensive to recycle.
For 16 months, I worried that it wouldn’t be recyclable at all.
I worried because it was all crappy Pentium II processors and Pre-OSX Apples and janky Sun workstations. Stuff our design and programming team would never touch (nose upturned). Not to mention the 105-pound rack-mounted servers. All of it full of toxic heavy metals. Not to mention the steaming pile of three button Sun mice and a giant nest of serial cables. And the 39 (!) keyboards.
Seriously, this stuff has been sitting around for years. It obviously must be some sort of corporate psychic baggage. Worse, I’ll bet most everyone reading this blog also has some secret e-waste laying around. We’re a web design shop, but every office I’ve ever worked in has at least one generation of ‘puters laying around.
Taking a clue from Ecoiron, a great blog of green hardware issues, recently bought the book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by historian Giles Slade. It has been pretty great so far, mostly string of amusing primary sources.
“Americans threw out 315 million computers in 2004, and 100 million cell phones in 2005. Most were still usable, and all contain permanent biological toxins (PBTs). Electronic trash, or e-waste, is rapidly becoming a catastrophic problem. To understand how we ended up in this alarming predicament, Slade recounts the fascinating history of American consumer culture and the engineering of our “throw-away ethic.”
- Booklist on Made To Break
not getting an iPhone. One less Blackberry that has to die in a desk drawer.
Anyway, about all those computers in the office. I was really just nervous about taking it all to the dump and feeling like a complete earth rapist or something.
But in the end, what did it take to get rid of them?
Well, it turns out, not a three-day excursion to the landfill. And we didn’t have to participate in some ill-conceived plot to ship it all to the developing world.
We just took pictures and listed it on Craigslist.
And 90% of it was gone in 24 hours. To people who were *delighted* to have it.
The moral of the story: give it away now. Even if you think it is too old to use, give it away. And then think twice about that new gadget. There is joy to be had in your ewaste. Reuse is cathartic.
Just discovered a beautiful resource of maps (mostly environmental info, especially soil) for most of the countries of Africa. (Found via Kikuyumoja’s realm.)
This is an incredibly thorough, high-quality resource, with scanned resolutions that will knock any map-lover’s socks off. The pages are easy to navigate, with appropriately-sized thumbnails and then really large downloadables.
Suitable for framing. And repurposing with overlaid data.
Here’s a bit from their intro:
“Data and information are essential building blocks of science. Many types of data, including extant historical data which have newly appreciated scientific importance for the analysis of changes over time, are not being used for research because they are not available in digital formats” (International Council for Science, 2004).
Maps made in the past remain the backbone for present and future studies. … Less and less new, fundamental soil data are being produced these days; the older data and information are being pumped around more and more. Therefore it is vital to preserve the older data (in this case maps) as they are building blocks of most current soil information. The user of present-day, derived information should have easy access to the source material, if only to assess the reliability of the derived material.
But, in many countries, soil maps are being lost because of lack of proper attention to storage and retrieval … This problem is acute in developing and transitional countries where valuable data, currently only available on paper, must be digitized before they are lost forever… The digitization of the African maps will enable the African countries to recover and re-use their soil information.
Translation of soil information from paper maps and reports into digital format is a prerequisite of the next step - the development of a digital information system on soil and terrain that may be drawn upon for manifold applications.
And now you can jump straight to the maps.
Woo Hoo! Wind-powered wireless!:
“A University of Texas professor creates tiny windmills to tilt at providing electricity: The prof has developed a system with his group that uses piezoelectric crystals which, when flexed by the small pressures provided by a 10-centimeter windmill running as slow as 17 kilometers per hour, can produce 7.5 milliwatts of electricity. This could be enough to power wireless sensors. After reading an excellent article on flywheels in Wired back in 2000, I envision a nifty future in which remote wireless transceivers could combine a small windmill, solar cells, and flywheels (instead of batteries) for a long-lived and low-maintenance power trio. Wi-Fi, of course, drains much more than 7.5 mW, and other technologies would be even higher. But this is an interesting start. If it’s cost effective someday to build tiny windmills, it may also be reasonable to build small, but not absolutely tiny ones that meet the downward spiral of wireless network power requirements in the middle. His paper from last year can be downloaded….
“
Read it: Windmills for Wi-Fi
(Found on:802.11b Networking News.)
A recent article in the New York Times discusses a report that computers are being “improperly recycled” (read: dumped) on developing countries as a way to avoid the expense of refurbishing them before redistribution.
“The report, titled “The Digital Dump: Exporting Reuse and Abuse to Africa,” says that the unusable equipment is being donated or sold to developing nations by recycling businesses in the United States as a way to dodge the expense of having to recycle it properly. While the report, written by the Basel Action Network, based in Seattle, focuses on Nigeria, in western Africa, it says the situation is similar throughout much of the developing world.
“Too often, justifications of ‘building bridges over the digital divide’ are used as excuses to obscure and ignore the fact that these bridges double as toxic waste pipelines,” says the report. As a result, Nigeria and other developing nations are carrying a disproportionate burden of the world’s toxic waste from technology products, according to Jim Puckett, coordinator of the group.
According to the National Safety Council, more than 63 million computers in the United States will become obsolete in 2005. An average computer monitor can contain as much as eight pounds of lead, along with plastics laden with flame retardants and cadmium, all of which can be harmful to the environment and to humans.”
This is an obvious insult to those who end up with the broken computers — which are presumably also an environmental hazard because of the heavy metals in a monitors and chassis. But this issue has a more important point in the discussions of the “$100 Laptop” prototype being developed at MIT, one major criticism has been that efforts would be better directed at recycling the mid-grade computer trash — that species of neglected Pentium 3 common in American Suburbia — for use in developing countries. This appears to be a promising avenue for development of ICT capacity: There is so much usable computer “trash.”
I think this is the best alternative to the concept of manufacturing $100 laptops, which seems untenable on a large scale.
But the problem implicit in the NYT article is that computer recycling is also harder than it sounds. The logistics required for a workable refurbishing operation are, I fear, insurmountable. Refurbishing is not cheap even for major companies like Dell, which have pre-existing warehouses to do their refurbishing, an existing website with which to sell their repaired wares, and a massive, efficient distribution system.
Any nonprofit that hoped to get computers to poor countries would have to recreate all of these systems, build an intake system (an address I could ship that Pentium 3 to, if I was inclined), and they would additionally have to deal with repairing the *hundreds* of brands of equipment that they might receive. This is a recipe for an unreliable computer at best, and this doesn’t even begin to address the overhead required for marketing and skilled directors.
Who could do this type of operation? No one I can think of, though I’m willing to keep looking. Until then I think our best bet for cheap global computing is the idealistic Negroponte effort at MIT.
Here’s the NYT article about computer dumping:
Read it: NYT > Technology.)
There are some very sophisticated techniques emerging into the semi-mainstream this year. You may not have noticed, and you may not care. But if you can get the hang of it managing the blogosphere, there’s a lot to be learned.
Rediscover your interests and your profession with the new tools of online networking: Blogs, tags and syndication.
Even if you don’t have a blog and don’t want to publish content, this stuff is for you. ONE/Northwest has a good tutorial on a couple of the most important tools.
Are you drowning in email that you don’t have time to read? And do you also feel a gnawing sense that you’re missing out on critical information? Welcome to the paradox of the “information age.” While we can’t help you stop the world from turning, in this article we’ll introduce you to Bloglines and del.icio.us, two exciting new tools that can help you tame your inbox, find relevant information that you’re missing, and share it more effectively with your colleagues and allies.
Check it out: Environmental technology, services, software for Northwest conservation groups - ONE/Northwest
