The other evening I was listening to a CBC radio program about eWaste (computers, televisions, appliances). They mentioned an eWaste recylcer in Barrie, Ontario. They can’t get enough components from old technology. They mine the gold and precious chemicals out of the equipment more cheaply than mining gold from the ground. They didn’t elaborate on how they do this, since it is possibly a polluting process.
They interviewed Giles Slade – author of Made to Break on the CBC show The Review.
I’ve written about eWaste before, citing the FCC’s push to digitalize television signals and hasten the disposal of several hundred million television sets.
Each TV has about 2 to 10 pounds of lead in it, which will end up in the water supply after being thrown away. Lead in the drinking water will cause all sorts of health problems in humans, including madness and birth defects. It’s easier to not put lead into the water, than it is to pay for it to be taken out.
Monday I contacted Saskatchewan Environment and Resource Management (SERM) asking about their plan to deal with End Of Life computers in schools and libraries. I figured surely the province has a plan to stop televisions, computer monitors, and desktop computers from being thrown into landfills and burried. It seems they don’t have a plan in action, at least not yet. The plan has been delayed until 2007. It’s being worked on in conjunction with industries resonsible for the eWaste.
Televisions will not even be included in the eWaste dropoff sites, despite the manufactures being the same as for CRT monitors. This is unfortunate, since every day there is no safe dropoff site, dozens more TVs end up in the landfills province wide. Each TV we can stop from being thrown out, is one less we’ll just have to clean up later at the landfill. It’s much simpler to pick up one TV at the curb, than a crushed TV, glass, heavy metals, plastic and all in a landfill.
Anyway, the SERM employee who phoned me was friendly and agreed that a plan being in place now would be the best thing. He too hopes that it will be up and running ASAP, and is hopeful that the industries will not avoid implementing their first recylcing program for eWaste. If that happens, government may need to realize that it has to step in, and provide the leadership sorely lacking.
I’ll be getting an email from SERM next year when they have the program ready, but it should be in the news too. I’ll pass along any information that I get about eWaste recylcing.
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talk talk talk | 14-Aug-06 at 7:43 pm | Permalink
Good post! It seems to me that we the plebes are way ahead of government and industry leaders in wanting and being able to articulate a sane solution to our garbage, whether solid, liquid, or ewaste.
Saskboy | 14-Aug-06 at 8:32 pm | Permalink
It really burns my biscuit that there’s no designated collection point in my city even for TVs and other recyclable toxic eWaste, other than the landfill. I might have to call City Hall and chew someone out. Actually a better way would be to politely request a dropoff site and get someone on my side, but when governments are stupid enough to allow people to poison us all, it’s tempting to yell or be argumentive.
Lance | 14-Aug-06 at 9:30 pm | Permalink
We never EOL’ed our PC’s. We ensure that the network card is PXE friendly or use an Etherboot floppy and convert them to thin clients as Linux workstations.
So, instead of having to buy new PC’s to run the biggest and best, we put out money into 3 application servers for three locations.
Each server now handles about twenty thins and they aren’t being taxed. (including DHCP, NFS, Samba, CUPS, X, Gnome Desktop (plus all the related desktop apps), TFTP, and DNS services).
The pieces that do get replaced, floppies, from use are minimal, ocassionally a monitor. We leave the HD’s in, but unplug them. No point in powering them.
The thins (avg 64 MB ram), 100BaseT all run about as good as Windows/Linux thick clients, a little slower but not much.
Lance | 14-Aug-06 at 9:34 pm | Permalink
Oh, and I should mention that the ltsp 4.2 has support for local devices, so USB devices and IDE CD’s are useful now.
That makes the change-resistance much easier to deal with.
Saskboy | 15-Aug-06 at 8:11 am | Permalink
You have an excellent policy. There may come a day though when a crucial part for those thin clients becomes unmanufactured, and then, along with the dead parts, we’ll have to have some recylcing plan in place. The piles of 2,3,486’s in landfills makes me nearly shudder. It really will be possible to mine landfills when we run out of other viable mines.
Ross | 15-Aug-06 at 2:09 pm | Permalink
go take a look at the dumps in abernethy and katepwa, there have been people ‘mining’ for copper wire and scrap metal for years. the aber dump is known to some locals as the mall. i prefer the cornwall center myself, but to each their own.