I interviewed Dell’s “lead environmental strategist” yesterday, and I admit I didn’t expect to be convinced by him. The way I saw it, Dell – and other tech companies – are the bad boys, the ones who drag their feet over removing toxic materials from computers, and the ones who make astronomical profits from selling us technology while ignoring the catastrophic effects it can have in Africa, India and China when we throw it away.
I didn’t expect to be convinced, but I was. I’m still not overly optimistic that Dell as a company will act fast enough, or even do enough, but I was convinced by Mark Newton. His idea for tackling this problem is for Dell to build, or help build, recycling plants in India and eventually other affected countries. They’re considering doing a pilot in India next year, although details are hazy at the moment. Here’s why it might work:
- Tech dumping leads to toxic chemicals leaching into the soil. It also poisons the people who search the dumps and burn the waste to get at valuable materials like copper.
- But it’s going to happen, because there’s an economic value in these materials. People don’t like burning bits of old computer in the street, but they do it because they have no other way of making a living.
- At the other end of the process, there are plenty of unscrupulous people in the UK, US and Europe who are happy to make money by posing as bona fide recyclers, taking broken computers off people’s hands in return for a fee, and chucking them on the next ship to Nigeria because that’s the cheapest way to get rid of them. This regular supple of e-waste is not likely to change anytime soon.
- The real problems start because there’s no infrastructure in these countries to cope properly with the dumped technology that’s full of toxic chemicals – and this is absolutely where the rich IT companies should be stepping in.
- The idea is that the recycling plants would process old technology more efficiently, getting a bigger amount of valuable materials out of it than burning it on the streets. So the companies running the plants would be able to pay people more to simply bring them old tech than these people would earn if they extracted the materials themselves.
- Efforts to stop this have so far centred on legislation – trying to prevent old computers getting sent to the developing world. Dell says it’s near impossible to try to stem the tide of e-waste, because the economic incentives are just too strong, and the UK government has admitted it is unable to stop the practice too. People will always work around legislation, especially in informal, emerging economies. It’s better, Newton says, to provide ways to deal safely with this waste once it gets to its destination.
- Getting multi-national corporations to invest in altruistic projects isn’t all that easy, but there’s an economic incentive here too: investing in recycling plants is a far cheaper option than trying to prevent the technology waste getting there in the first place. Producers like Dell are legally obliged to deal with this stuff, and this could cut the costs of doing so.
These plants are not the whole answer. It doesn’t mean that tech companies are off the hook when it comes to getting rid of toxic materials in their computers, or that governments should stop coming up with ways to prevent or solve the problem. Consumers need to make sure we’re doing things right too. But I was so pleased to hear the right kind of ideas coming from a senior Dell figure – I’ll be interested to hear if and when the company actually acts on it.
Image via GreenPeace