Can We Do the Same Stuff but Without the Toxic Waste?

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Can We Do the Same Stuff but Without the Toxic Waste?

12/2/2004

By Terry Calhoun

I was reading an interesting article about "green chemistry" the other day. The designer of a new chemical who is a "green chemist" will consider the effects of its use in the world from the moment of its creation, throughout its entire lifecycle in the ecosystem. The development of green chemistry as a worldwide industry is being driven by financial needs from manufacturers, as they face expensive cleanup costs. But it's also driven by university research, and institutions are training the materials engineers and other scientists who can think and operate this new way.

At the same time I came across an article about the disposal problems consumers are facing as millions replace their old television sets with flat-panel displays. Most of us don't think about how to dispose of that metallic box full of toxic wastes that we call our laptop, and which contains our lives. When we do, it's easy to understand that we have a waste disposal problem with the laptop itself. But the problem is vastly greater than that.

Computers are wonderful things. They enliven my life and improve its quality so continuously that my interaction with them on a daily basis could not be described in understandable terms to the average US citizen of, say, 1955. They often do a very good job at what they're built to do. But it's the things that they do which are not intended that need a closer look by, hopefully, "green" designers. Designers who can design manufacturing, packaging, and shipping processes that use less material and energy, and far less toxic materials; designers who will pay attention to the possibly negative effects of humans using computers; and designers who will think through the entire lifecycle of a computer and plan for the reuse of its components in ways that are financially viable and which do not fill up dumps with toxic waste.

Materials Intensity of Manufacture/Lifecycle

People who study the "materials intensity" of various kinds of manufacturing processes perform minute measurements on the materials (metals, plastics, water) and the energy used to manufacture various things. Forget about "toxic" substances entirely for moment; would you have guessed that it takes nearly 600 pounds of fossil fuel and 6400 megajoules of energy to make a single Pentium III computer with monitor? That makes typical information technology equipment approximately 10 times as "dense," in terms of the relative amounts of material to make it, than an automobile.

A lot of that fuel and energy is used in the manufacturing of silicon chips. But there is also the fact that even to get a plastic keyboard, manufacturers have to get raw materials, turn them into the right kind of plastics (with dyes and other possibly toxic things), process them, mold them, and assemble them. Each step takes energy, materials (sometimes toxic ones), and generates its own waste at lifecycle points well before the end-of-life issues arise.

Toxicity During Use

Studies are popping up in the news media about this or that research which hints that, for one example, the more people watch a computer screen the likelier they are to have glaucoma. At the current stage of medical knowledge about such things, I join most of us in dismissing those as "real" problems--at least so far.