Computers, Society, and Nature

For you computer/e-waste fans, here are some great books:

Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers
(Heard her on the radio the other day–she’s fantastic)

High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health by Elizabeth Grossman

Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry edited by Ted Smith, David A. Sonnenfeld and David Naguib Pellow, foreword by Jim Hightower

One of my all-time favourite computer waste books because it’s the first attempt to quantify the environmental components and costs of computers:

Computers and the Environment: Understanding and Managing their Impacts, edited by Ruediger Kuehr and Eric Williams

Canada is finally getting serious about all the high tech trash that is mysteriously finding its way from Canadian white collar offices and recycling firms:

A joint investigation by Environment Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency since last year seized 50 containers loaded with about 500,000 kilograms of “E-waste” — discarded parts valuable to foreign junk merchants who extract recyclable material from the goods.

Although, as the report mentioned, Canada has signed the Basel Convention, making it illegal to transport hazardous waste, it also neglects to mention that the federal government creates its own loopholes to the Convention. For example, computers are not considered hazardous waste unless they are disassembled. Moreover, the federal government has often been the worst offender when it comes to inadvertently shipping its own computers, monitors, and printers to China.

Still, it’s never too late to live up to our image of being an environmentally responsible country (especially now that the minority government has decided it’s expedient to act like one).

Finally, a way to recycle cell phones in Canada, either via a drop off location or mail. The money generated from recycling the cell phones goes to local food banks. Hopefully the recycling will save some gorillas too, if think-food is able to recycle the coltan in the phones.

Just a few thoughts on this festive day on sobering waste statistics from the UK:

* More than a billion Christmas cards – 17 for every man, woman and child – will be delivered this year. That’s enough to stretch around the world five times.

* 52 square miles of wrapping paper – enough to gift-wrap [the Isle of] Jersey – will be ripped off by Boxing Day.

* 125,000 tons of plastic packaging – equal to a million [UK Labour Minister] John Prescotts – will end up in the bin.

* Six million trees have been bought but only 1.2 million will be recycled. The rest will be left to rot or be thrown away.

* Shops sell 16 million turkeys and 830 million sprouts. Up to 40 per cent of festive food is wasted.

* Turkey foil wrap will create 3,000 tons of waste.

* Within three months, 41 per cent of the toys children receive will be broken. Most will go to the tip.

* Many will get the latest mobile phone but only 10 to 15 per cent are recycled.

What to do? Besides being judicious about the amount of food you cook and the sturdiness of the toys you purchase,

Take your tree to be ground down. Many local governments now accept trees for grinding into mulch. If your’s doesn’t then demand that it does.

Save and reuse your Christmas wrap or wrap your presents in cloth, an old Japanese tradition.

Other ideas?

It doesn’t take much silver to kill household germs. That is why microscopically tiny particles of silver are showing up in all manner of products, from sneakers to air freshnerers. But just because they’re small doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous to the environment. A growing number of scientists and environmentalists are concerned about the impacts those nanoparticles have on bacteria, aquatic habitats and humans once the particles are flushed down the drain or end up in landfills. So the US Environmental Protection Agency has decided to regulate nanosilver.

Just saw the announcement for the disposable digital video camera from pure digital technologies, Inc. (okay, the original was announced last year, but this is the new model.) There’s lots of buzz about them in the popular press. The video camera comes with USB connector, flash memory, and an LCD screen. Is anyone worrying about the computer hardware on these throw-away devices?

According to The Internet Consumer Recycling Guide,

Recent studies have show that, despite the recycling claims on the boxes, less than half of disposable cameras are ever actually recycled. Enough cameras have been tossed to circle the planet, stacked end-to-end. Local film developers often have little or no incentive to return the camera bodies to the manufacturers, and not all parts of the cameras are recyclable. Kodak has started to minimally reimburse developers for the costs of sorting, storing and shipping, but processors are still faced with a bewildering variety of types, brands, and procedures for dealing with them.

I’m going to contact pure digital to see what their policy is on managing disposal. I’ll let you know the results.

Not recycling computers but using computers to boost recycling. The idea is that you pay people to recycle. Computers are used to track that recycling and calculate the renumeration.

It’s called RecycleBank.

Households get credit for the weight of materials they recycle, which is scanned and recorded through a computer chip embedded in the garbage bins when they are picked up by the sanitation crew. They exchange that credit for coupons at various businesses. Municipal officials save disposal fees. Recycling companies make more money from processing. Retailers gain the feel-good association with a socially beneficial activity.

RecycleBank charges municipalities (or private haulers, depending on the arrangement) $24 a household, and guarantees clients that they will save at least that much in disposal fees as waste is diverted from landfills and incinerators. The company also receives revenue from recycling plants, depending on how much it increases the amount of materials that are processed.

The computer chip is a radio frequency ID, an RFID (apparently, the entrepreneurs found a company that already made bins with embedded RFIDs!).

The “smart waste” tag, a combination computer chip and bar code, enables the bins to be scanned and weighed and the amount linked to a household. The information is channeled from an on-board computer in the garbage trucks into a databank.

The Internet is used so that participating individuals can check their point balance online and obtain their coupons.

Now how about using computers to get people to recycle computers? Love that recursion.

With 50 million computers being made obsolete every year, here’s one site that contains concrete strategies to reduce some of the waste.

The average man or woman in Britain uses over 3 tons of electrical and electronic waste in a lifetime. How do you convey that quantity in a dramatic way? WEEE man is an art installation in Britain that attempts to graphically demonstrate the average amount of electrical and electronic waste that a Briton uses in his or her lifetime. The sculpture stands 7 meters high and looks a lot like C3PO. It’s made from discarded equipment such as washing machines, televisions, microwaves, vacuum cleaners and cellphones.

WEEE comes from the European Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, which is just now becoming law in the European Union. The law requires that all manufacturers who build and retailers who sell products in the EU assume responsibility for the products at the end of their usefulness. Technically, it’s called end-of-life management. The ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of WEEE going into landfills by reducing the number of goods used, finding other users for the goods, decreasing the amount of hazardous materials in those goods, or recycling the components where possible.

Here is the text of WEEE.

Update: calculate your WEEE footprint here.

We’re beginning to hear about the enormous amount of toxic contamination in and around New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Most of the reports have focussed on contamination from sewage.

However, New Orleans and that area of the Gulf Coast have long been surrounded by a soup bowl of toxic materials of petroleum, heavy metals, pesticides and herbicides.

the Mississsippi was one of the world’s most polluted rivers, draining nearly 40% of America’s landmass. In 1990, Mississippi basin farmers applied 21bn pounds of fertilizer and 283m pounds of pesticides. The run-off of nutrients starves the water of oxygen and creates the world’s largest “dead zone” off the Louisiana coast. This year it expanded to an estimated 8,000 square miles.

Lake Ponchartrain, on the other side of NO is not much better. It’s been a historical dumping ground for sewer plants, dairy farmers, and recreational boaters, rendering the lake unavailable to swimmers until cleanup began at the late 1990s.

That’s just agricultural and human waste. The hardest hit area of Orleans and Plaquemines Parishes sits at the stretch of the polluted lower Mississippi where some 140 oil and petrochemical plants are clustered together. It’s called Cancer Alley, so called for the high incidence of varying types of cancers that afflict its primarily poor and black residents. A lot of that has washed into the floodwaters.

Locally, gasoline, diesel and oil leaking from underground storage tanks at gas stations also poses a problem. Add to that oil and gas bubbling up from the sunken fishing, pleasure and cargo ships. This fuel is creating a deadzone for fish and wildlife.

(Don’t forget the natural gas erupting from burst underground lines, which is causing fires all over the area.)

The biggest needs at the moment are clean drinking water and making the area minimally habitable. So incredible effort is being made to get rid of the water by pumping it into Lake Ponchartrain. However, we’re just removing one problem to create an environmental time bomb. According to geographer Chris Wells, who works for the US Geological Survey:

“The New Orleans area that was flooded was an industrial area where you have all the lubricants and batteries and heavy-metal plating — it’s just hideously dangerous,” … “We can’t wait around to test the floodwater before we pump it back into the lake — people are already dying of disease from it — but it’s a terrible thing to do. We’re going to avoid a great human disaster by doing this, but we could be creating a damn big environmental one.” Forget for a moment the scenario of a toxic lake in the middle of a major American city; should a future hurricane breach the levees again, New Orleans could literally be submerged in poison.

Just another example of our modern lifestyles comprising the ingredients of a toxic soup we then have to live in. Sorry, the poor among us have to live in.

Update: Apparently the US federal government may not be able to find out the ingredients of this soup as they’ve excluded the Environmental Protection Agency from cabinet level talks on the aftermath of Katrina.

The NYTimes reports that numerous companies are offering cash for your old cell phones. Besides getting cash, or in some cases reward points, you also can save the environment.

Many of the sites take all phones – including clunky, brick-shaped dinosaurs – and simply recycle those that cannot be reused. Phones taken in that still have value are tested, outfitted with any needed accessories and then sold to dealers who resell them as refurbished phones in the United States or abroad. Some phones are donated to charities for use as emergency phones.

Even if cellphones sent in are not worth reselling, precious metals like gold from their circuit boards can be extracted and reused, said Rob Newton, president of OldCellPhone.

And by keeping used phones out of landfills, these potential money-making opportunities can also help the environment.

“It’s very important to remember that although each phone is small, they’re really a bundle of highly toxic materials,” because they include chemicals like arsenic, nickel, zinc and lead, said Joanna D. Underwood, president of Inform, a national environmental research organization.

The sites are:
RipMobile
Cell for Cash
Old Cellphone
Phone Fund

None of the sites are in Canada, I’m afraid.