Ezra Klein: New Vistas...For Trash

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March 27, 2007

New Vistas...For Trash

Brad Plumer has a fascinating article on an issue I'd never considered: The enormous dump of toxic materials that'll come when Microsoft's new Vista operating system renders millions of computers obsolete and creates a sudden rush for replacements. Apparently, only half the computers in the US can handle the resource-intensive program, while only 5% of the UK's computers can do the same. That, of course, is the point. It's great for Intel and AMD and all the rest when Microsoft forces everyone to buy a new computer, and this is, after all, the march of progress. It's not so great for the environment:

About half of all discarded computers (and a large number of "recycled" machines) simply get shipped off to developing countries like China, India, and Nigeria, where salvagers and scavengers use appalling means to "process" the waste--burning lead-tin circuit boards, dipping parts in acid to retrieve gold, and pouring out the resultant sludge into rivers and streams. Since the regulations for treating waste over there aren't exactly cutting edge, toxic materials like lead, cadmium, and mercury get dumped into the environment in alarming qualities, leading to a rash of health problems.

What to do? Who knows? Regulators could deal with the market failure by forcing computer manufacturers to use fewer hazardous parts in computers, implement effective disposal and recycling programs, and ban hazardous waste exports. And then they could climb back on their magical pony-planes and zoom back into their cloud castles and give some lonely rainbows a hug. Nah, we'll just keep with the dumping.

March 27, 2007 | Permalink

Comments

> What to do? Who knows?

There are various environmentally-certified computer recycling programs in the US. I believe IBM's is one of them (fee of $35/unit); Dell's might be also (if I understood correctly, Dell is going to include a recycling coupon with all new PCs sold after Jan 1st 2007 so there will be no fee for those). There is also a certified local recycler in our city. You have to look for them but they are out there.

Cranky

Posted by: Cranky Observer | Mar 27, 2007 10:14:38 AM

Also, I should add the obligatory and never-heeded note: these "obsolete" PCs are mostly 733 Mhz (how quaint "megaherts" sounds today in this age of giga) and above. With a consumer distribution of Linux(tm) (Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc), Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office installed they are perfectly suitable for 97% of the browsing, e-mail and word-processing tasks people actually use their computers for.

Cranky

Posted by: Cranky Observer | Mar 27, 2007 10:18:26 AM

We have a second-hand shop in town (Recycle North) that takes old computers, refurbishes them and sells them to low income folks at a really cheap price. These computers are perfectly fine for most families who have kids that need the internet and a word processing program for reports (especially if they run Microsoft's best OS, win98).

Re-use beats recycling, especially when you have to come up with an economical heavy-metals recovery process.

Posted by: verplanck colvin | Mar 27, 2007 10:27:44 AM

An aggressive marketing campaign telling people how useless a Windows Vista "upgrade" is would serve the same purpose, I think.

Posted by: David | Mar 27, 2007 10:48:53 AM

How will Vista render machines obsolete? It only will if somebody upgrades to Vista knowing that their current machine won't be able to handle it. Given that Vista has no real must-have features, why would anyone do that?

Also, as Cranky Observer notes, a huge proportion of machines wouldn't be upgraded to Vista even if it weren't a waste of time and effort.

Posted by: Ginger Yellow | Mar 27, 2007 10:52:15 AM

What to do? Who knows?

At the risk of confirming the liberal stereotype, I'll note that Europe has implemented laws that require manufacturers to take back their products at the end of the consumer life-cycle. This has provided them with an effective incentive to make their products more easily repairable and/or recyclable. Now...where's my latte?

Posted by: DMonteith | Mar 27, 2007 11:21:54 AM

I suspect that if Vista finds a home at all, it will be among new machines that are sold with it already installed. I doubt that many organizations are going to rush to upgrade to the new OS.

Posted by: sglover | Mar 27, 2007 11:22:44 AM

Cranky is right, of course, that responsible recycling programs exist. Use them.

That said, progress is progress. You want to be a progressive, and advocate for progress, then Vista is a reality check for you. Progress involves loss, sometimes painful (re-)learning, the acceptance of novel annoyances and limitations along with new power and achievement.

But, don't worry. There's room in this world for liberal reactionaries.

Posted by: Bruce Wilder | Mar 27, 2007 11:31:04 AM

Vista is progress? With a 3D interface that sucks the life out of a perfectly fine 3GHz processor with a gig of ram? Please. Just because it's new doesn't mean it's any better than its predecessor.

Posted by: verplanck colvin | Mar 27, 2007 12:41:43 PM

Local, private re-cycling or re-use programs are certainly good, but invisible to most of their users.

This is a good example of how far behind progressives in the US are in thinking socially. First, a government mandate to recycle is needed, and a certification program for recyclers/resellers. States/cites/counties need to have convenient centers (maybe including home-pickup) available. There should be no cost to the pc owner on the recycling end of the use cycle - that cost should be built into the initial product cost - like bottle recycling in many areas) - so that the incentives are in the right place (including incentives/disincentives for manufacturers to get the poluting crap reduced in the first place).

This really isn't rocket science, as the EU program mentioned in comments above. Liberals have just gotten gun-shy about advocating social action after years of being bashed by the right.

As for MS Vista: I sure am not wistful for the Intel 8088 cpu in its 8 bit glory (or car tires with inner tubes, either). Progress isn't always a totally straight superhighway, but it gets us there eventually faster/better than the county roads. PC software operating systems far outlast the hardware designs they rest upon, so it's necessary to force a change periodically. I'm both resigned to having to buy a new pc to support Vista, and glad to move to a totally clean pc environment - there are over 100,000 entries in my registry on Windows XP (lol). I'm just waiting for service pack 1 for Vista to call Dell again. Maybe this fall for Turkey Day.

Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Mar 27, 2007 12:43:36 PM

But, don't worry. There's room in this world for liberal reactionaries.

Posted by: Bruce Wilder

Well, sure, if you take a black-and-white, status-quo-or-immediate-and-total-change view of progress. More realistically, though, Microsoft does not have a total monopoly, half the computers in the country can already handle Vista, and the older half will not be replaced overnight. I'm not an open source ideologue, but if Vista really is as revolutionary as Ezra and Brad Plumer seem to think, Microsoft will make money as people switch over, but I'd bet their actual market share would, if anything, drop slightly in favor of stuff like Linux.

Posted by: Cyrus | Mar 27, 2007 12:50:44 PM

"...(especially if they run Microsoft's best OS, win98)."

Posted by: verplanck colvin

Heretic. Windows 95!

Posted by: Barry | Mar 27, 2007 4:10:34 PM

Personally I would rank them:

1) MS-DOS 5.0
2) Windows 2000
3) Windows 95

Cranky

PS I do know how to spell "megahertz"!

Posted by: Cranky Observer | Mar 27, 2007 4:21:09 PM

Solution: stay with xp. It does everything I need it to do.

Posted by: Wells. | Mar 27, 2007 9:23:13 PM

Fourteen comments, and no obligatory "get a mac?"

The Linux comment, though, is spot on.

Posted by: tinman | Mar 28, 2007 1:33:07 AM

I'm wholely unconvinced by arguments that Vista is in some way bad because it's a resource hog on current machines. Are computers suddenly going to stop getting faster such that a Vista machine will always be scrambling for scraps of memory to run Freecell? I've never upgraded to a new OS when it's actually new and I don't plan on it now. As Jim mentioned above, after a service pack or two have been released I'll be able to get a machine that can run Vista and have quite a bit of horsepower to spare, and that's when I'll upgrade.

As to the 3D interface, I haven't used it, but aesthetics matter to some people and while Win 95 or 98 might have gotten the job done at the time they certainly aren't very pretty in retrospect. Time goes by and technology gets more complex and resource intensive. It's just as true for OS's as it is for video games.

Posted by: Ben | Mar 28, 2007 10:12:37 AM

I'm not sure that Vista is going to be more than a blip in the numbers of junked machines; it is already huge.

There's a lot of planned obsolesce in computer hardware already. For example the electrolytic filter capacitors in the motherboard have a very limited lifespan (many are spec'd at 2000 hours *1). Newer machines seem to have more problems with this than older machines; their higher power demands make them more dependent on filter capacitors on the MB. It's also deeply tempting to use a lower grade with a shorter lifespan; this can be a substantial savings; capacitors in general amount to a surprising fraction of the board's cost.

I know that I've been seeing a lot of mortality at the 3-4 year point with the current batch of machines. Most folks replace their machine when the mobo goes. Techies like me solder new ones in and keep on going; but realistically how many people will do that?

So I expect Vista to advance the upgrade cycle a bit; machines will be trashed a year earlier than they might have been. But I'm not sure that it will be as dramatic as people are expecting. I also expect there to be a lull afterwards; since a whole bunch of machines will be brand new, they won't be recycled for a while. But the fundamental fact is that the industry is built around a quite short equipment lifespan and consequent large volumes of trash electronics.

I wonder a bit about the projects that gather discarded computers and send them to 3rd world countries. The way heat shortens these components lifespan implies that they may see little life out of those machines before they are stuck with them as waste.

1) I know many people have machines that last longer than that; the manufacturer guarantees that 2000 hours is the survival time 99.9% of the parts, and many last longer. The fun is that when you have a dozen or so of these on the board, it only takes one to go before you have troubles. The failure mode is also often kind of subtle; increased ripple voltages which can cause weird intermittent effects, dropped bits and the like. Meanwhile the rest of the caps are carrying more than their share of the load, reducing their lives in turn. It's interesting to look at the MB's in the local recycle shop; many come in 'running' but with half their caps oozing electrolyte.

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