RantsCounterRants:  Awash in electronic waste…is the answer in sight?

Once upon a time in the not-too-distant past, I ran a warehouse for an information systems department.  We serviced more than 10,000 local users’ demands from my warehouse; we shipped on average 15 PC’s and 2 servers each day to points all over the U.S. and the globe to service another 40,000 users.  I can’t even begin to sum up the networking equipment I handled.

A lot of equipment.

One monumental amount of waste.

We recycled every bit of cardboard we could, amounting to more than 3 cubic yards each week (more than a BIG pickup truck load, cardboard flattened and compressed, bundled).  Pallets were shredded and recycled either as mulch or used in a burner.

Hard drives and metal components were salvaged as best we could, although recyclers weren’t always available.  The freight would kill us – we’d have to ship to a facility 2000 miles away for certified environmentally-sound handling.  We sometimes resorted to sending the stuff to a smelter.

But plastic in all forms kicked our asses every single day.  The stuff just wouldn’t die.  We actually rolled in the stuff some times for fun when our spirits were low.    We made lounge chairs out of it and duct-taped it into sumo wrestler suits when we couldn’t get it out the door because our 40-foot dumpster was full of it.

Nasty, bad, toxic.  The beaded styrene stuff in which monitors are shipped.  The spun-foam polyethylene in which servers arrive.  The endless plastic bags which cover every puking piece of equipment, from anti-static bags on diskettes and disk drives to the bubble pack on PC’s and baggies on keyboards and mice.  Wretched excess.

My staff and I always tried to recycle everything, but plastics were always far more abundant than our needs.  Anti-static bags and bubble wrap were reused again and again; packing foam, especially the lovely pillow-y soft stuff in which high-end cards and drives are packed were shipped out, returned, then shipped out again.  

But there were always the little sneaky plastic parts that would resist our ability to recycle and could only be discarded.  Into the dumpster and off to the landfill with those little “aprons” that appear on a certain brand of keyboard; following suit were plastic stands for monitors and keyboards, broken and failed mice.  Long dead Macs, Apples, Compaqs, HP’s, IBM’s, you-name-the-brand, printers, printer stands, tape cartridges.  There was no other place for them, no one to take them.  And I had far more resources available to me than the average consumer – good God, how much electronic waste ends up in landfills from our homes?

I prayed the U.S. would catch on and begin to look at electronic waste as toxic waste (it does to a very limited extent: monitors discarded in quantity are actually considered toxic waste) in the same way the EU looked at this waste.  If a company sells electronic components in the EU, they are responsible for the environmentally-safe disposal of the same components at the end of life cycle.  It’s beyond me why we’ve never insisted on the same regulations here in the U.S. -- as if we didn’t believe landfills existed or that plastic was ever toxic.  Total denial.

A ray of hope: HP is moving to support legislation requiring computer manufacturers to assume responsibility for electronic waste.  I’m sure this is a difficult step to take for HP, but being an industry leader in this matter could help them set the tone and build goodwill for their brand.  If handled properly, this could lead to greater customer retention – after all, this means the manufacturer will have some contact with the customer at the end of life cycle on their own products.  Companies like HP will be able to determine exactly why the consumer is discarding the equipment, whether they are changing brand loyalties, possibly even ascertain what will be the next purchase at the close of this loop.

Properly managed, this could be a very good thing for everyone.

The one thing I don’t see being addressed is shipping and packaging waste, but I’ll have to hope that local recycling will continue to handle this and where local recycling is not available, the sellers assume responsibility for this waste.

My fingers are crossed.  In the mean time, I hope to never have to work in I/T provisioning and warehousing again.

10:11:21 PM    comment []