Old PCs Flood the Waste Stream

People swamp Web sites that offer free computers, but Paul Kirk couldn't give away 800 Pentium PCs last fall.

Computer disposal firms declined to take the machines, saying they were already loaded with castoffs that weren't year 2000-compliant. Charities and schools said 133 MHz was too slow for them.

Finally, Kirk, information technology manager at United Companies Financial in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was able to sell about 400 PCs to employees for $100 each. The rest went to recyclers that dismantled them and sold the scrap copper, gold, and glass.

There's an overlooked byproduct of Moore's Law: more garbage.

Companies that upgrade hardware every three years face an increasingly critical problem: what to do with tired, old computers.

Only 39 percent of 102 information technology managers surveyed by Computerworld said they have a consistent, companywide policy for dealing with retired hardware.

"People continue to ignore the situation. It's bad all around," said Frances O'Brien, an analyst at Gartner Group in Stamford, Connecticut.

Think about the volume: More than 20 million PCs became obsolete in 1998--but just 14 percent of those were recycled or donated, according to the latest figures from the National Safety Council, an environmental watchdog group in Washington.

Gartner says 114 million PCs were sold last year, and another 133 million will be sold this year. And they'll all need a final resting place in a few years.

Costly Storage

Without a plan in place, PC disposal is a scramble for IT departments. Many companies actually end up spending money on machines that are no longer worth anything, either by paying recyclers to haul them away or by warehousing them for lack of a better idea.

For example, while Kirk was trying to shed his retired PCs, the machines sat for six months in building space that United Companies normally rents out for $17.50 per square foot.

"The rate of obsolescence in computer and electronics industries is so incredible that you have vast quantities of waste entering the waste stream, and the infrastructure to deal with that hasn't developed," said John Hanson, executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario in Toronto.

Meanwhile, some recyclers, which buy used gear to resell or dismantle for scrap, are so flush that they're turning away business.