E-DUMPING

From TheStudentWiki

1 Introduction
2 E-Waste
3 Prolonging Computer Life
4 Refurbishment
5 Green Design
6 External Links

Introduction

Every year about 1 million tonnes of waste electronic and electrical equipment are thrown out by people and businesses in the UK and computer equipment accounts for 39% of this electronic waste. This is an important issue which needs dealing with because electronic goods are becoming more and shorter lived. On average 4% of European waste is from electrical equipment and this figure is growing. There are things we can do to help combat this amount of waste including new designs for computers, refurbishment and upgradeability to help give equipment a longer life span and make computer waste greener.

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E-Waste

E-Waste (Electronic Waste) consists of all kinds of electrical equipment which users no longer need and discard. This can be anything from computers, mobile phones or entertainment systems. This is usually because they are broken or irreparable and no longer needed by the user and there are several ways in which they are discarded.

Dumping is one of the methods of discarding and is more common. A prominent area where old computers are being dumped is Asia; this is a very pressing issue because it is extremely dangerous, it is resulting in the release of toxic materials. It was reported that computers and parts were found floating down rivers in South East China. There is a treaty which is supposed to prevent this called the ‘Basel Convention’ but the United States have not approved of it.

There are also reports that waste is being received in India and Pakistan from the West, and that people have been smashing up the machines to scavenge for the metals inside. Some interesting facts which were found are that 24,000 tonnes of equipment were sent to landfill or dumps and out of 164 million new computers which were bought in 2003, over 1 million computers were dumped.

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Prolonging Computer Life

Trying to make computers stay up to date with regards to there components is very difficult. The computer component industry is bringing out new upgrades and new innervations all the time so trying to keep the computer up to date for longer so to stop the waste of components to help the environment. Millions and millions of computer components are thrown away all the time.

Its is not that hard to keep and computer up to date if you are willing to spend a lot of money on it. If you pick the highest end of your components so that you don’t have to upgrade so soon you would be looking at spending about £2,500 per machine. But unfortunately even if you spend that much it is inevitable that in some period of time you will need to upgrade again.

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Refurbishment

Computers get new life These days when Personal Computers become quickly obsolete, this is an important question because legally we can't dump them in landfill sites can we? In today’s world computer advancement is continuing at a rapid pace with the laptop you bought yesterday going to be old and slow in just 2 years time if not sooner, maybe we do need to upgrade but what happens to the old computer?

Maybe refurbishment is the way forward? Operating in tiny warehouse’s and industrial estates in company’s and charities refurbishment already takes place on a small scale with workshops completing 75 computers per month on a wider scale these proportions could be tremendous.

Why else should we refurbish? Well just because it could save the world from vicious gases is not just one reason, how about the cost refurbished computers are going for as little as £40 an few years ago they would have cost twenty times that, so if that isn’t a barging I don’t know what is. This helps the poorer in the community become computerised which would help the underprivileged no end.

Where do we get it refurbished? http://www.one2one-connected.com/airedalecomputers. There are many places similar to this in Airedale which refurbish computers and resell as well as other appliances.

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Green Design

In order to remedy some of the issues highlighted above a more innovative design approach is needed. By reducing the materials that will later inhabit the landfills we could stem the flow of computer waste.

The technology now exists to project high resolution images onto a flat surfaces. This could serve to eliminate the plastic and other components used in the manufacture of monitors. Obviously some people may not have the space to house the present technology so further innovation and size reduction will be necessary.

Nearly every PC comes with a plastic keyboard even though for some time laser keyboards have been available. These project the image of a keyboard onto the desk in front of the user and then tracks their finger movements to input text to the computer.