E-Waste
Photo courtesy Bert Van Dijk
We Americans love to talk about the future of history. We’ll say a certain president will be revered or reviled by it, or that a particular statement or movement will go down in it. We spend a lot of time thinking about what the future will think of us.
This is ironic, because the things people in the future will judge our society for most harshly have very little to do with politics. Our wasteful personal decisions are having far reaching effects today, and these effects will grow exponentially through history.
Think, for example, of computers. Most of us own them and feel they’ve made our lives better. We use them for work, to keep in touch with family, to listen to music and a seemingly infinite number of other things.
These devices are immensely powerful. The cell phones most of us carry around can do far more than supercomputers that took up entire rooms as recently as the 1970′s.
But as amazing and useful as these technologies are, the most remarkable thing about them may be how quickly we throw them away. An EPA report states that Americans disposed of between 1.9 and 2.2 million tons worth of electronics in 2005 alone. Of that 1.5 -1.9 million tons ended up in landfills.
Computers in landfills are a big problem. Besides the obvious—computers aren’t exactly biodegradable—a computer is full of heavy metals and various chemicals which could pose problems for our society in the future.
But this arguably isn’t even the worst result. Each year scrap yards in Asia and Africa pull apart millions of our used computers by hand, hoping to extract the few scraps of copper, nickel and gold inside the units. This is often done with no safety regulation despite the aforementioned dangerous chemicals and heavy metals.
Obviously our disposable culture’s approach to computing needs to change. This is the principle that defines us here at iSupportU. The world is full of e-waste, and we hope to work with our clients to make their technology work for as long as possible.
There are many positive developments happening today. The average age of a home computer today is 6 years, the longest its been in history. We can stretch that further if we work together.
