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Computer Recycling
 

Photo: Matthew Bowden

MIND MAGAZINE | You’re staring at a five-pound tumor. Underneath your fingertips, a chunk of landfill space. And humming beside you is an environmental time-bomb with Intel inside.

Last July, Intel proudly announced that the computer industry had sold its one billionth personal computer. It was a festive occasion. In less than twenty years the personal computer has gone from quaint parlor piece to ubiquitous machine. When they first came out, PCs were an enormous calculator capable of producing primitive graphs, running simple text-based games and storing recipes (for everyone with a computer in the kitchen). In other words, 30 pounds of cutting-edge inutility.

Times have changed. It is rare to find a home without a PC; rarer still to find an office that doesn’t have one. These days, computers are used by children for playing graphically stunning games, teenagers for Internet chat rooms and adults for work and distraction. It is a fast developing industry that constantly has new items to offer—and therein lies the problem.
 

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Half of all computers in use today will be obsolete in four years. Growing demand for Internet access and powerful graphic capabilities means that a majority of people will soon be parting with their machines and upgrading.

But where do all those old computers go?

It’s an important question, as computers are not as innocuous as they might seem. They are complicated and intricate machine that require some fairly potent material. A full five pounds of your average computer is toxic. Most of these machines and their toxins end up at the local dump. In fact, high technology equipment is one of the primary sources of heavy metals and organic pollutants in municipal garbage, and growing by three to five percent each year.

A dumped computer is not going to decompose any time soon. Half of the machine is made up of glass and plastic, a big chunk is assorted metals, while the rest is a mixture of toxins, including arsenic, lead and suspected carcinogens mercury and cadmium.

As with many other waste problems, recycling computers has been touted as a possible cure. Right now, only 10 per cent of computers get recycled and the facilities for doing so are few and far between.

Unlike the more straightforward procedure of recycling a pop can or a wine bottle, computer recycling is very time consuming and energy intensive. According to William Ference, Director of Operations of Reboot Quebec, a computer recycling and reuse program, a trained professional needs approximately 10 to 15 minutes to disassemble a computer into its recyclable components. To put this into perspective, it would require approximately 20 million hours of labour this year just to dissemble all of the discarded computers.

The situation is only going to get worse. The higher the sophistication of the computer, the more integrated all of its parts and the longer it takes to strip, making it harder for the computers to get recycled. Since the monitor and the power supply have the most interconnected parts, they tend to take the longest to dissemble.

Time is not the only investment. Once a computer is broken down into its component parts, huge amounts of energy are required to stabilize and recycle electronic waste. The metals like copper and aluminum get sent to smelting plants and are melted down into a reusable form. However, copper smelting produces approximately three tons of solid waste for every ton of copper produced and both the wastewater and the vapours can contain dangerous substances like mercury, arsenic and lead.

These substances, present in computers, need to be stabilized so that they do not contaminate ground water. One strategy is vitrification. In other words, the waste is heated at a high temperature, upwards of 10,000°C, and turned into glass, which can then be disposed of in landfills or used in building projects and road construction. So, a few years from now, you may be driving or living inside parts of your old computer.

But, for the time being, it is the rare computer that gets recycled, reused or resurrected. Most still clutter landfills and contaminate groundwater, a growing memorial to an ever-changing technology.


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