Growing Problems With Electronics Waste

eldavojohn writes "The BBC is reporting that many countries are dumping their e-Waste in poorer African nations. From the article, 'The world's richest nations are dumping hazardous electronic waste on poor African countries, says the head of the UN's Environment Programme (Unep).' The problem with e-Waste (versus other wastes) is that the gases and chemicals that make up a lot of electronics are particularly harmful for the environment. I suppose nobody takes their computer, TV or Radio to the repair shop anymore since a new one is a fraction of that cost down at the local convenience store."

Ironically

[Alioth]

Ironically, the EU regulation RoHS (which is intended to cut down on hazardous materials in electronics) is likely to make the waste problem worse - since it bans solder with lead in it. Lead free solder is quite inferior to leaded solder - it tends to be more brittle, and tin whiskers are more likely to form. This means electronics using lead-free solder will fail more frequently and earlier, and therefore need to be replaced more frequently, increasing the volume of waste - and probably more than negating the intended effect of RoHS in the first place.

Bad news

[Sv-Manowar]

It's somewhat ironic at a time when governments such as Britain's are pressuring their citizens to be ecologically responsible and do their part, when at the same time they are just taking their issues and hiding them 'under the carpet to say'. Especially when MEDC countries are pressuring the developing countries in order to lower their economical aspirations in order to be environmentally aware ("Meanwhile the British leader is likely to raise the issue of global warming, and what developing countries like India can do to help tackle it." at the BBC [bbc.co.uk]). Seems to me as when the developed world is pushing on one front in order to gain public support and more education towards global warming, behind the backs of this they are just doing the same as usual in order to get rid of problems that would require investment, something we should be ashamed of.

Re:repairs vs new

[mccalli]

I gave someone a quote of £175 to fix their laptop. They preferred instead to spend £339 on a new one. Even if the cost is lower for repairs people still prefer to buy new (which doesn't make much sense to me).

£339 - £175 = £164. £164 for an upgraded laptop starts to sound ok, doesn't it. Now take broken'ish laptop and put on ebay and you reduce that £164 figure still further, depending on age and how broken it really is. Suddenly the choice is obvious - unless this laptop is a current model, you're as well geting rid and buying something more up to date.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:repairs vs new

[Qubit]

Buying new means starting over -- the keyboard is clean, nothing is broken, and you get to pick an new model, etc...
You get a new warranty, and you (probably) get better system specs.

Those are some pretty convincing arguments!

As a result, I get a lot of older laptops this way. I fix them up and give them to friends or use them for little servers. Until a laptop is a commodity like a toaster, where the new model won't have that much to offer over the old model, people will buy a new computer instead of repairing an old one.

And anyhow, people toss out their old toasters and buy new ones all the time, too... so maybe people will never go back to fixing their broken tools/machines. It's sad...

I'll explain why they choose a new item.

[Anonymous Coward]

So they bring their used laptop to you for a repair. You charge £175. As with virtually every other device and piece of machinery out there, it'll likely break down more frequently as it ages. Soon enough, they'll be paying you another £175 to repair it when some other part breaks. And finally something else will eventually go, perhaps costing another £175. So they've spent £525 repairing what is likely by now a slow, underperforming system.

They'd be stupid not to spend £339 on a new system, especially when it comes to laptops. A difference of a year can mean a two- or three-fold performance improvement. Plus they'll likely experience a longer period of time before the next failure. So it's no wonder they'll pay £339 for a new system, rather than paying £525 for repairs (over and above the original purchase price).

It's just simple economics, lad.

Re:I keep all my old electronics

[ColdWetDog]

You do realize that most of the world isn't interested in starting an antique electronics museum. Besides, you're just procrastinating. Someday, someone will want to dump the stuff.

Not just price...

[Kris_J]

"I suppose nobody takes their computer, TV or Radio to the repair shop anymore since a new one is a fraction of that cost down at the local convenience store."

Or because you can't actually get them fixed. The insides of even a semi-modern TV are surface-mounted, machine-soldered ICs and small components, not servicable by most humans, particularly since many individual parts aren't available to repair companies. So, you have to buy an entire "module", only available as a "spare part" that costs roughly 75% of the price of the latest model.

Companies should be forced to include, with your electronics purchase, two small parts likely to fail early.

Re:repairs vs new

[user24]

Laptops always were pretty much disposable; when was the last time you upgraded your laptop? It's too much hassle/cost/risk. We just deal with slow outdated laptops untill they're too slow and outdated, then we bin them or give them away. What's changed?

I like your eco-friendly remark. There'll be a market for wooden laptops and hemp carry cases soon. (cue futurama references: wooden bender).

Re:repairs vs new

[CodeBuster]

They are looking at the problem from the standpoint of, "If I fix this now and it breaks again in six months then it will cost me another £175 to fix it or I could just get a new one with Windows New and Better Edition that will last for at least a couple of years, plus I will get all of the new whiz bang features (and more frequent flier miles on my credit card to boot)". This is how the average consumer is trained to think from a very early age and you can blame our public education system, the great gift of England to the world, for being designed to produce good soldiers or citizen consumers who are docile, do what their told, and don't think too hard about it. This is in contrast to the generally more intelligent free thinkers, such as ourselves, who like to understand the subtleties and nuances of a decision or at least be able to reason logically on the fly, but we are the ones that the government is watching because who needs those trouble makers anyway?

Does this mean that fixing the laptop is always the best course of action? Of course not, but people tend to fall back on their ingrained programming when they are not sure about a snap decision and for most people that means the consumer program and not the hacker program that is more typical here on Slashdot.

Environmentalism is a luxury good

[patio11]

When you don't have enough money to eat every day, the prospect that some point removed from your house has, egads, gasses and metals at it doesn't seem quite as frightening. The nations of Africa, like many before them, will start caring about environmentalism when they have a high enough standard of living for it to be a pressing concern. China is starting to get greener as their economy improves (note "greener": they're still dirty, but if you were there 15 years ago you would be amazed people could live in their cities), and many late industrializing countries (Japan, Taiwan, etc) have high levels of environmental consciousness (I hate that word, incidentally) after decades of less-than-Greenpeace-approved actions taken to bolster their economies.

Incidentally, the other reason the whole "We'll take your junk if you pay us for it" works is that NIMBY-ites in rich Western democracies don't want the stuff anywhere near them, so they pay to have it dumped somewhere far out of sight. Then the same folks cluck-cluck about how we're exploiting the Third World.

VISTA should greatly increase e-waste

[Proudrooster]

Just think about the impact MS Vista and Office-2007 are going to have on e-waste. If you want the new MS bloat code with the almost as good as MAC interface, then you are going to need (minimum) a 64-bit processor, liquid cooled video card, and 2GB of RAM. Africa needs to brace for the boat load of PIII's and low-end P4's about to show up.

It's really sick that modern computers have such extreme processing power relative to 20-years ago, yet we must continue to upgrade.

Reverse Microsoft Recycle Tax?

[gelfling]

Since the fucking tools in Redmond are shoving ever more bloated crap at us requiring us to replace our hardware ever more frequently why the hell don't governments charge Microsoft that recycling tax instead of pushing the problem down on the consumer who has no other choice. I for one am sick as shit listening to people tell me it's my problem.

Making Computers Durable Goods

[starseeker]

The technology I think has been stabilizing, each new processor/component doesn't introduce the user visible performance leap its predecessor did. The changes are more incremental now, and older machines have longer lives before they are outpaced by the demands of software (and I have a feeling a lot of those demands aren't really necessary, but that's another issue). Rather than making cheap disposable boxes, I would advocate a return to engineering for durability, robustness, and future proofing (many older machines are built like tanks - I prefer that durable approach to computers personally. My IBM PS/2 keyboard is probably 20 years old, but still works like a champ. There is no excuse for keyboards that don't last - it is a solved problem and the evidence is out there.) Start to make a big deal about 5 or 10 year warranties on computers, and convince the public that they SHOULD be able to use this machine for that period of time. (First of course you must design and build a machine that is actually a reasonable machine to use for such a period, but I doubt that is an insurmountable obstacle - open hardware projects might help.)

Vista's longevity has actually helped consumers I think, because it broke the whole "upgradeupgradeupgrade" mantra that had come before it and provided some real product stability. I doubt this was the original intent, but I'm glad it happened. Perhaps consumer expectations for stability and robustness can be increased, and we can start to engineer operating systems, standards, and APIs that are intended to be bulletproof and last for decades or even centuries.

Re:Is this really such a bad thing?

[argoff]

The truth is that if you calculate it out, 35 square miles at 200 ft deep is more than enough to hold all the US trash for 1000 years. Considering that the surface area of the earth is several orders of magnitude larger, it doesn't take much to figure out that we don't have a trash problem but we do have a problem global bureauocrats who think they know how to manage our lives better than we do. The worst scam they push on people is the one about "toxic" cell phones. Bullshit, all the cell phones on the planet could fit in 200 cubic feet of space, they are just trying to scam money from lucrative industries.

Re:Not just price...

[kabocox]

Or because you can't actually get them fixed. The insides of even a semi-modern TV are surface-mounted, machine-soldered ICs and small components, not servicable by most humans, particularly since many individual parts aren't available to repair companies. So, you have to buy an entire "module", only available as a "spare part" that costs roughly 75% of the price of the latest model.

Companies should be forced to include, with your electronics purchase, two small parts likely to fail early.

It's ironic, I actually blame CAD/CAM for our shoddy stuff. CAD/CAM can be used for good, but let's be honest, they've used it to reduce cost. When you had 3-5 year factory warranties on purchases of devices over $200 the enginners used to use the best parts that they could to make sure that their average failure rate was far past that warranty period. As a side consumer benefit, some very well designed items made before computers are still quite usable. I'd say from the 90s onward CAD/CAM has been so common that enginners can pick cheaper but "o.k." or "good enough" parts for a 1 month to 1 year warranty. Why worry about the device after that?

I don't really have anything against our let's buy a replacement rather than repair culture. I don't think including spare parts for things that are likely to fail would help. What I'd really like the government to do though is require that all of our new replacements be designed to be easily taken apart and recycable though. That would atleast help reduce e-waste by allowing some portion of it to be recycled.