For the past week or so, I’ve been struggling with a topic for this month. This morning, I was talking to someone on the phone and the topic got around to a cordless phone set that I was looking at using at home. The only problem with it is that the battery doesn’t hold a charge. My first thought was that I could just buy a new rechargeable battery. However, seeing that it’s a two handset combo and that both batteries were in question, I thought to myself that it would probably be cheaper to toss both of the handsets and the base – that the cost of a new phone would probably be not much more than buying 2 new batteries.
As soon as these words came out of my mouth, I realized the whole fundamental problem with technology; it is based to be thrown out. It is clearly designed to be obsolete, leading us to buy the newest and greatest every few years.
For those of us that have purchased computers, stop and think about how many “old and slow” computers you have at home – that are collecting dust because they don’t meet the needs of technology anymore. I know that for myself (in a three person household!), I have 1 notebook and 2 desktops that are currently being used. However, I also have 1 other “older” notebook and two other desktops that no longer meet my needs.
This follows in quite closely to my previous article on chasing the carrot of technology and that’s what we do.
The advances in technology encourage us to dispose of our hardware and software.
The true hidden cost of technology that is not considered nearly enough is what do we do with all of this hardware that we no longer use?
Here at work, our property managers had a “used electronics drive” to encourage their tenants to dispose of old hardware in special containers so that they could be recycled properly during the month of April.
I noticed a memo up in the kitchen the other day from the property managers saying that they had acquired 13,000 pounds of hardware in one month! That is 6.5 tons of hardware that thankfully is being diverted from landfill areas and being recycled.
The real question that begs to be answered is if there are 13,000 pounds in the GTA that is being recycled, then how much hardware is NOT being recycled – and that’s a scary answer.
What components are sitting in landfills and as they rust and corrode? What is being released into our environment?
I recall back in the…mid 90’s…I think. America Online was famous for sending out unsolicited CDs to encourage people to sign up with AOL. Without any exaggeration, I’d say that I had received at least a couple of dozen CDs in the mail or in magazines. Did they all get recycled? Based on this being in the 90’s – probably not, I’m afraid. I would think that it is probably a very conservative estimate to suggest that there are perhaps 1,000,000 AOL CDs in landfills. According to many ecological assessments, it will take approximately 500 years for a CD to fully decompose!
Another case in point is ink-jet printers. I am of the opinion that ink-jet printers are a prime contributor to this problem. They are so cheap and the ink itself is so expensive that should one have any difficulties at all with the hardware, the sad thing is that it’s probably economically better to just throw out said inkjet printer and purchase a new one instead of getting it fixed.
Same problem with cell-phones. My concern with cell-phones is that marketing plans actively encourage us to buy new cell phones when we “fall out of love with our old phone”. How do companies justify encouraging us to throw out something just because it isn’t new and shiny anymore?
The “theory” is that this is something that our government is concerned with, but the reality is that I’m just not sure. The Ontario government does charge an environmental disposal fee when new hardware is purchased. However, according to their legislations, they charge a grand total of $7.80 when a new computer is purchased. Is this really sufficient when it comes to the point in time when the hardware is recycled? Perhaps it is, maybe I just haven’t done enough research (I haven’t) to be able to offer an opinion on the efficacy of the program, but something just smells to me.
Let’s not even talk about the impact on the environment to physically do this recycling. How much gas is used to transport 11,000 pounds of hardware to a recycling depot? How much smoke is generated in the recycling plant? What chemicals do they use? How much of the hardware is actually recycled?
This whole issue of recycling our hardware and software, very clearly a significant hidden cost of the technology.
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