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Where Is Away? Or, What Happens When You Flush the Toilet.
10/12/2005
So, maybe we wash our hands of the problem and have easy consciences because we contract with a company to dispose of our old computers? If that’s the case on your campus, do you know what that company d'es with the machines?
An investigative study in 2002 reported on recycling activities at a small village in China, where “recycled” computers from the US (including, among others, from the LA Unified School District and the State of Kentucky Education Department) were torn apart by villagers to retrieve the most valuable components.
Workers there, who make about $1.50 each day, have to import their drinking and cooking water from more than 15 miles away because the side effects of their work have poisoned the earth and the water around the village. For example, to obtain the metal from inside the wires, villagers burn the wires all night long and retrieve the metal from the toxic ash – which lies and blows around the village in piles, among which children play all day long.
Some one in California and in Kentucky thought they were doing the right thing in doing the modern version of throwing something “away,” which is sending it to recycling. Good attitude; unfortunate reliance on a company with poor ethics.
Upstream Waste
Even the most conscientious among us, however, rarely think about what gets thrown “away” in the process of manufacturing our computers. A study at the United Nations University in Tokyo found that an astonishing 500 pounds of fossil fuel, fifty pounds of chemicals, and 1.5 tons of water are used to make a typical desktop computer. Even just that tiny little chip, which you can hold on your fingertip is made by consuming 75 pounds of stuff that might get thrown “away.”
That university is, by the way, doing some incredibly interesting work in this field. A more recent study it found that:
“two wireless technologies have dramatically lower environmental impacts than some of the conventional technologies they can replace. The analysis focused on the environmental effects created during the production, use, and disposal of each alternative. First, reading newspaper content received wirelessly on a personal digital assistant (PDA) was compared to the traditional way of reading a newspaper. The PDA method resulted in the release 25 to thousands of times less CO2, NOx, and Sox, which highlights dramatic opportunities to reduce environmental impacts by shifting other paper-based communications to electronic media. The second comparison found that wireless teleconferencing results in 1-3 orders of magnitude lower CO2, NOx, and SO2 emissions than business travel, highlighting an opportunity for organizations to reduce their environmental footprint.”
This kind of research is welcome and necessary. It helps us to get where we eventually have to get if we don’t want to poison the biosphere. And we don’t want to do that. As my good friend Anthony D. Cortese of Second Nature constantly reminds me: No matter how “far from nature” we think we live our daily lives, we are still within that biosphere. And our concern for the biosphere is and should be self-interested. After every major extinction we can find in the fossil record, the biosphere and some form of life continues, just not what was there before. In this case, that could include us.
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