Title should read: Aspiring author with evidence of a relatively minor issue — finding small quantities of harmless e-waste at an e-waste recycling site — is peeved that tech companies were more interested in resolving the issue than providing material for his book, launches an unsuccessful campaign to smear said companies' reputations and get free publicity for his book
These are really small quantities. The companies involved are way too large to bother with two boxes full of HP drives or a bunch of defect graphic card PCBs.
The author makes a big point about NEW hardware being dumped, but fails to deliver. This looks like numerous companies bought HP hardware over the past 10 years, and have been tossing it here as they upgrade.
The HP drives look older to me - one is a 146GB 10K Fibre-channel drive that Amazon doesn't sell anymore. One of the labels shows "Tested Jul '05". The other is a 72GB 15k Wide Ultra320 SCSI.
The monitor is a 14.1" WXGA, which looks to max out at 1366x768. The label shows "Date of receipt: 10-May-10"
The crop of the 3rd barcode is very blurry, I couldn't figure out what was in it. Apparently they're supposed to be Samsung-branded, but the box isn't branded at all. (other than mentioning Korean assembly)
The next 2 images are really trying hard - one is the AMD-labelled PCB for an AMD/ATI Radeon, and the other is its ATI-branded heatsink. The author tries to grow his list of offending brands by including both of this company's brands. You can find one for sale on Ebay. (http://www.ebay.com/itm/ATI-Radeon-Graphics-Card-Model-B403-...)
Apparently Panasonic Aviation is part of Panasonic. (http://www.mascorp.com/) Still, the pink label in the photo notes the manufacture date as "28 Feb 06".
The HP drives are certainly not manufactured by HP, only HP branded.
Partnumber on label on 3rd photo is clearly Samsung's (S3C...) and seems to be some semi-custom CPU for TVs so it's entirely possible to be discarded by Samsung's customer instead of Samsung. Also parts that are discarded because they don't pass QC testing are usually not packaged (as packaging invalid parts is large mostly avoidable cost) or at least visibly and irreparably destroyed (like drilled through) to make them unsellable and unusable for counterfeiters, not thrown away with complete original packaging.
The AMD board was certainly discarded during manufacturing, I would quess that by automated optical check after reflow (through hole components are not assembled, there seems to be missing component marked by the arrow label). Due to various process limitations, discarding such boards tends to be cheaper (and maybe even more green and eco-friendly) than trying to fix them.
"Based on our internal investigation, we confirmed that the boxes were not discarded by Samsung Electronics or by one of Samsung’s recycling partners. Furthermore, the semiconductor components contained in the boxes were manufactured in 2004 and had been shipped to a customer overseas. In the case of components – unlike finished products – all rights and ownership are transferred to the customer after a sales transaction has been completed."
I think s/he meant that in the statement, they used the wording "unlike finished products", meaning that if it actually was finished products, some rights and ownerships would've been retained by the seller. In which case, what rights and what kind of ownership rights would be retained?
How would Coca-Cola respond to a writer asking about all their cans in landfills? How morally responsible should a company be for what their customers do with purchased merchandise?
Coca-Cola should be responsible for making sure that its cans are recycleable, I would say.
Due to the toxic materials embedded in electronic waste, the consumer can't be expected to, or be trusted to carry all the burden of disposing of it appropriately. How this burden is to be divided between the makers and sellers of electronic goods and governments is an important question for debate.
As an avid dumpster diver, nothing irks me more than seeing people throw away perfectly functional equipment that they just don't have a 'fashion sense' for, any more.
I'm rapidly accruing enough material for my own data center. My kids have their own little mini-studio of keyboards, samplers, and whatnot, to deal with.
I'd love to be putting the thrown-away computers to better use in my area. If only there were some sort of really big cultural effect that could occur that would make it utterly unacceptable to take your "old computer" anywhere other than a school or education facility put in place to prevent exactly this kind of ridiculous waste from occurring ..
You'll get down voted for it but its completely true. Anyone who thinks they are helping the environment by still using their ancient P4 instead of junking it is kidding themselves.
As if it costs no energy to make a new computer? If you want to minimize total energy costs, you have to consider manufacturing energy costs. The case for just getting a new computer gets even worse if you put all of your old computer's energy costs as a sunk cost. This study shows that amongst the early 2000s generation of laptops that even if you use a laptop for 7 years [1] (you have to squint at the first graph), manufacturing still accounts for ~50% of energy costs. Even assuming that manufacturing efficiency increased even more than operating efficiency since then, the answer is still not clear cut.
Now obviously at some point, it becomes better to get a new computer period, and most P4s may already be in that range, but as a generalized statement, should be taken carefully.
Pathetic, really. Whats so 'ancient' about a P4? Its still just as functional as it was the day it was minted - a manufacturing process that cost the earth a LOT in terms of resources. The carbon debt of producing last years computing devices is still huge, and that is all going to be thrown away and ignored because the "P4 isn't fast enough any more.."
So all those resources are going to be wasted just because its not 'fashionable' to have a slow computer any more?
I find this attitude disgusting. There is no such thing as a 'dead computer', only dead users. That P4 that someone finds 'uncool' could just as easily make a huge difference in someone else's life, it only it weren't sitting there in a huge pile of garbage, rotting away ..
There is a thing called "longevity" - i.e. ability to source the same SKUs for 5 years. It's very important in Embedded / Industrial / Military markets.
The only reliable way to achieve longevity is to buy spare parts and store them for entire period. Of course the supplier will charge much higher price. After longevity period is over the parts should be destroyed.
Wouldn't "e-waste" - properly handled - by an income source for developing world nations? For sure there's plenty of health and safety problems to be handled carefully, but allowing people to salvage various minerals and metals would seem a useful idea.
I'm pretty sure they are already doing this, if not acquiring new minerals by active mining. I wonder if the actual compute r would be worth more as a functional device in a developing nation?
Right, but put together a 'recycling company'. What's the cheapest way when you don't have access to skilled labor? Probably to just melt it all down and skim off the 1% or 2% of gold...
But even with semi-skilled labour you can recycle copper reasonably easily. At least, it could be done a lot better than just burning the insulation off cables.
There's so much stuff which could be reasonably easily recycled - the lead, aluminium, copper are all easy. Then stuff like gold is extractable. Then the rare earth minerals - is it easier to scrape all the surface mount components of a board and then extract the tantalum etc than it is to mine those things from raw ore?
I understand the need to protect developing nations by not just dumping garbage on them in the guise of "second hand computing good enough to use".
As I understand it, one of the problems is that in some places the safety equipment you give people has a high re-sale value, thus people sell their boots / gloves /masks to get cash. I'm not sure how that'd be fixed.
It's pretty common for whole parts (not only raw materials) salvaged from e-waste to be resold (usually not designated as salvaged and sold as new, but that's entirely different matter).
They are doing this. When you send this crap (and non e-waste) crap to China, people are going out and making a living extracting whatever they can. They are pulling out the copper and gold and aluminum and all the good stuff. You send them plastics? They'll tear it apart, melt it down, and resell it. There are entire villages who live in piles of our crap, and making their living off it, while slowing killing themselves.
The problem as you've put it, is the health and safety issues. Which returns to why we send it to China to begin with. They don't care about health and safety, so it's dirt cheap. Extracting gold with acid baths? Guess which one is cheaper, the open pools of acid on the ground, or the one in a processing facility with fume hoods, safety equipment, proper monitoring and disposal?
> The soil in Guiyu has been found to be so saturated with heavy metals such as lead, chromium and tin that groundwater has become undrinkable.
> According to China's Shantou University, the town has the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world, and local children suffer from an extremely high rate of lead poisoning.
This is a serious problem, but it's one that could be fixed with some strict eco and H&S law in the country concerned.
