In 2008, seven million PCs will be available for recycling. Of those, just 500,000 will be recycled, 1.6 million will be sent to landfill, and the remaining 5.4 million PCs will collect dust in garages. ZDNet Australia asks why Australians treat old PCs like last night's leftovers by covering, storing and deferring the purge until the item's value flatlines.
Digital relics die hard: 5.5 million waste away in garages
Credit: Liam Tung, ZDNet Australia
2007 should have been the year Australians seriously set about recycling their old PCs -- initiatives such as Sustainability Victoria's Byteback program were established, offering Melbournians free PC pickup and recycling, while state governments across the country imposed recycling clauses in procurement contracts.
2007 should have been the year -- yet over five million of them rest in the hidden wasteland of Australian garages, leaving PC-recycling businesses lacking PCs to recycle.
Recycling outfits such as MRI -- the company Dell uses to fulfil its promise to take back and recycle its end of life PCs -- remain supply-constrained, according to its managing director, William Le Messurier.
The supply problem could be solved if the five million PCs stored in garages around the country were sent or sold to recyclers, Le Messurier told ZDNet Australia.
Yet, if Australia suddenly woke up from its "store, defer and dump" slumber, the country would still lack the processing capacity to handle both the volume of PCs and certain types of toxic materials they contain.
"If we were able to access that, our industry would be flooded. It's scary," Le Messurier said.
Le Messurier gets AU$1,000 per tonne for circuit boards.
Credit: Liam Tung, ZDNet Australia
"Putting a PC in storage is holding you back from getting more utility out of the product from its useful life. Storage is not really a good option, because it devalues the item and as time goes by it becomes less and less useful," he said.
The hoarding complex
So why do Australians keep hoarding PCs? Do we have a hoarding complex? Does the same mentality that causes people to wrap tonight's leftovers in plastic and wait until it expires in the fridge before binning it, cause them to cling to a PC until its value flatlines?
Francine Garlin, a marketing lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney who specialises in consumer psychology, said hoarding can be addressed if people understand the impact of their consumption and disposal choices.
Mounting e-waste pressures
According to Environment Australia, between the years 1980 and 2011 Australians will have purchased 45 million PCs. Over that time 5.5 million will be stored and 7 million computers will have been recycled.
But the majority, 24 million PCs in total, will end up in landfill, representing 2.2 million cubic metres of waste -- enough to fill 1,000 Olympic swimming pools -- some of which is toxic and 30 percent of which is plastic.
In 1984 622,000 new PCs were purchased, with just 500,000 becoming obsolete in that year. But in 2011, 2.29 million PCs will be purchased while 2.25 million PCs become obsolete.
"I think there could be a lack of awareness on the consumers' part -- about how they can recycle and why they should recycle PCs," said Garlin.
"Australia has tended to be reasonably good at recycling but the issue of government intervention is going to become more significant if we're going to be moving more quickly towards the goals we're trying to achieve as a society," said Garlin.
Garlin is optimistic recycling rates can be improved -- even in the absence of economic incentives.
"There's a growing awareness of exactly what PCs being dumped means in terms of the environment. We know that there is a lot of toxic material in PCs that are not good for the environment," she said.
PC manufacturers, following the example of some Scandinavian car makers, must take responsibility for the disposal of their brands, argues Garlin.
"[Manufacturers] need to be innovative in the way they address the issue of disposal. This includes looking at also ways in which they try and promote this as a benefit to the consumer as well. That's only going to be a benefit if they tap into consumer's motivations," she said.
To an extent, this form of "product stewardship", whereby a manufacturer takes responsibility for their products through better design and disposal, has occurred in Australia via Victoria's Byteback program. HP, FujiXerox, IBM, Fujitsu, Epson, Dell, Canon, Apple, Lexmark and Lenovo contribute to it by funding the recycling of their own products under the program.
Can Australia salvage the wreck? See page 2.
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danielz_23
20/01/2008 04:07 PM
Its simple... people pay so much for the technology they don't want to just throw it away... its worth $2,000+ one day and $50 in scrap the next. The technology keeps getting replaced by companies cashing in and this is the result, and very few want to take the old PCs as trade-ins as we do with Cars.
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kermit
21/01/2008 04:09 PM
Another freakin column about recycling pc's and then no links or contact details at the end except if you live in Victoria. i try to recycle my pc's switches hubs etc , Vinnies didnt want them , HP told me I had to pay for the pick up (yeah right) so i was left dumping them in a bin
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true but why should we hoarde
30/01/2008 08:44 PM
yeah i only have a couple parts and a laptop from the 90s -it still works
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lunarlander
09/02/2008 11:24 PM
Maybe it's cause we cant trust where the info from our hard drives will end up, even with a reformat. If you are in the Illawarra, Computerbank Illawarra will recycle monitors & pcs for needy people. Call them on 1300 769 919. I gave them my 2 old pcs.
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correz
21/02/2008 05:33 PM
I thought that CNET would have answered itself when it can reference only one Victorian company involved in recycling! Combine this with every second computer security article suggesting that the only secure-old-hard drive is a smashed-hard drive and I would have thought that you already have the answer. Not rocket science and barely even computer science!
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Multi007
26/05/2008 09:14 AM
Im from the USA and we have the same problem here. Something worth $2000 one day is $100 the next. Its hard to throw away. And when we try to recycle, there is either a charge or next to impossible. Another reason I still have 3 pc's from the 1980's - Amiga 1000, Comodore 128, Apple IIE, is that they still work and the games I have for them still work too. Sure I can use an emulator on my modern PC, but its not the same.
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