Old PCs Flood the Waste Stream

Hardware Hazards

Roughly 17 percent of users in the Computerworld survey admitted to throwing PCs out with the trash. Yet when computers sit in landfills, environmentalists say, poisonous chemicals such as lead and cadmium escape into the air, soil, and water.

Hardware disposal is now "a lot more pressing for us," said Joe Burrus, desktop coordinator at Apache, an oil company in Houston, Texas. "It would be nice to get three years out of a good desktop, but it's just not working out that way."

Burrus and his staff recently spent several weeks erasing hard drives and finding nonprofits to take 250 Compaq Pentiums that were no longer usable by Apache after its Y2K remediation.

An upgrade to Windows 2000 late this year will produce another 150 used Compaqs to deal with, he said. Burrus plans to donate them but doesn't know exactly where they will go.

The task of finding proper homes for retired equipment often falls to environmentally conscious IT staffers.

Ruesch International Chief Technology Officer Ron Szoc and his staff recently ushered 150 used PCs to local shelters and children's homes.

Still, Ruesch, a finance firm in Washington, ends up junking some machines. "No one wants a 286. You can't run [the latest] Windows on it," Szoc said. "It's like an empty tin can. You need to throw it away." He figured the company has tossed 10 or 15 such boxes.

Finger-Pointing

Part of the problem is that no one group wants to take responsibility for hardware disposal.

Many user companies and analysts say PC companies should take back retired hardware. Indeed, some do--but only for their very biggest customers and only if a deal is made at the time of purchase or lease.

Garbage collection companies say PC makers should use safer, nontoxic materials during manufacturing.

PC companies generally say that local governments should set up facilities for the safe disposal of computer junk.

But computers are a mix of varied, and sometimes toxic, materials. That makes recycling difficult and time-consuming, because someone has to separate the parts, said Gary Kelman, an officer at the National Association of Environmental Professionals in South Portland, Maine.