We’ve all seen the depressing pictures of African children picking through piles of toxic-looking broken computers, but it’s not every day that a powerful western government says it can’t do much about it.
But that’s what Catalina McGregor, who is deputy champion for green IT at the UK government’s Cabinet Office, says.
She says that the UK, the rest of Europe and (particularly) the US simply throw away too much technology. No matter now many laws you put in place to try and stop this dumping, it’s still going to happen. As long as it’s possible to make money by selling broken computers onto people into the developing world, criminals will do it. They creep around the law by saying that the massive shipfuls of computers they’re exporting are actually second hand goods – and the authorities don’t have the resources to check every container that leaves the UK. They get hold of the waste by pretending to be bona fide recycling firms.
Experts aren’t exactly sure who makes the money, and how. It could be that the people in the developing world aren’t actually aware when they pay for these huge containers of computers that they’re all useless. The containers arrive in Ghana or Nigeria, and are found to be broken – there’s not much to be done except dump them. Or the people receiving the technology could be finding enough working units to sell some on, and make some money.
This all makes it sound like it’s pretty impossible for any of us to do anything about it, aside from upgrading mobile phones, PCs, laptops and TVs less often. But there’s another huge step consumers can take, and that’s to only buy products that don’t have toxic materials in them.
Stuff like PVC, mercury, bromide flame retardants and various other long-named chemicals that cause problems for the children and adults who eventually wind up trying to extract valuable copper from piles of dead PCs. The methods they use are dangerous – like burning wires in big vats of acid – and the chemicals they release are disgusting. They cause cancer and lung diseases, and the way they extract materials causes welts and burns.
Greenpeace has been trying to lobby the big tech firms for years to stop using these toxic chemicals. Some are doing pretty well – Nokia, for example, is one of the best. Some are doing abysmally. HP, Dell and Nintendo are dragging their feet and either making excuses or refusing to change. We keep buying their products, and when we’re done with them they often end up dumped in Africa or Asia. If there weren’t so many nasty substances in them then a lot of the problems these dumps cause could be reduced.
You can check Greenpeace’s site to see which firms are doing well on the toxic front, and there’s an international standard called EPEAT which requires all sorts of things from manufacturers – everything from reducing toxic contents to proper end-of-life recycling. There aren’t many products registered in the UK yet, but as soon as consumers start showing it’s something they want, more companies will join.
Big organisations obviously have way more buying power than individuals – so it might be worth bringing it up with your employer, university or school. They can write clauses in their procurement contracts that make environment responsibility a requirement – eventually, the tech firms will have to start listening.
Rebecca Thomson is a reporter on ComputerWeekly.com. You can follow her on Twitter as @rebeccats.
Image via Greenpeace / Natalie Behring-Chisholm