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e-waste

Monday, 30 March 2009

E-waste is a subject that's close to my heart... As a member of the IT industry it's also a responsibility that I have... While projects like Connectivity for Refugees, InfoXchange, Computerbank and others help reuse unwanted PCs, at some point the PCs are just too old to keep using. Most of these programs only accept Pentium IIIs or later for reuse. Not all the components are too old though... Changing the RAM and Processor can sometimes be all that's required to speed up the computer...

If I was in charge of e-waste policy for the nation this would be how it would work:

• Technology suppliers would be required to submit design improvements to their equipment once per year.
• Technology suppliers would increase the price of technology by, for example, $5 per item (or on a sliding scale dependent on complexity), this money would go directly into an e-waste fund.
• Every local IT/Tech/Not for Profit shop would have the opportunity of joining the e-waste program to accept any form of e-waste. This would also ensure access to e-waste facilities for all - as there would be a facility at almost every shopping strip. Staff at these local shops would be paid $5 per piece of equipment accepted from the e-waste fund.
• The local shops would be able to clean and resell any working pieces of equipment for a profit.
• The shops would pull apart any unusable equipment and create bins of capacitors, metal, plastic etc. available for purchase for people using this equipment regularly or for public projects. Training would be provided free of charge for safe handling of equipment by all IT shops.
• Councils would be paid from the interest in the e-waste fund to collect unsold, separated parts once per month and deliver to local manufacturing/reusing plants or store fronts.
• Remaining waste would go to a facility like byteback where parts could be used for energy recovery. This facility would be within the participating country so no toxic e-waste would be shipped to developing nations (Though they would be able to have the waste if they could reuse it safely).

This would allow for maximum reuse... Would ultimately be a user pays model... and would support the local IT/Tech economy. There are so many precious metals and rare materials involved in the production of electronics, reuse is the only way for this industry to be sustainable.

The CSIRO has recently discovered that nitrogen trifluoride (NF₃) - used in the electronics industry as a replacement for perfluorocarbons (PFCS) in LCD screens - is an extremely harmful greenhouse and ozone depleting gas. We are only going to discover more of these issues as time goes on. It's time to stop raw materials producting in the Tech industry and start reusing what we already have!

Two initiatives are making promising headway in this field StEP and BAN but action is slow...

Labels: e-waste

posted by genloz at 11:44 PM 0 Comments