|
Computer Recycling
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.
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.
Copyright
© All rights reserved. MindMagazine.com
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission
is prohibited.
Legal Notices:
Copyright |
Privacy Policy |
Terms of Use |
Disclaimer |
