Green opportunity
Environmental considerations are becoming increasingly important for technology users, be they multinationals looking to improve their public image or consumers worried about their personal carbon footprint. But, in both cases buying "greener" technology is just half the equation. An equally important part is the disposal of hardware when it reaches the end of its useful life, and until recently that was a largely ignored problem.
IT analyst Gartner estimates that as many as 460 000 PCs reach "end of life" every day around the world. Another 550 million mobile phones are estimated to be dumped for a new one every year. Which adds up to a lot of toxic waste that needs to be dealt with.
South African musician turned e-waste recycler, Johnny Clegg, says that as much as 60% of the toxicity in waste dump sites in directly related to e-waste and yet e-waste accounts for just 2% to 3% of the actually waste in a typical waste site.
The problem that exists, however, is that e-waste recycling is a specialised service and South Africa doesn’t yet have the facilities to recycle the entire e-waste package. Typically, South African waste recyclers will salvage the obvious materials from PCs – the metal casings and plastics – and then crush the motherboards for shipment to overseas recyclers, usually in China or Europe.
Technology dump
With current techniques, as much as 98% of a normal PC can be recycled, says Clegg, but the problem locally is that consumers and businesses don’t know where to dispose of their old hardware.
Fortunately this is starting to improve with a number of initiatives launched recently. One of these is the joint Makro-FujitsuSiemens collection points at a number of Makro stores. The Woodmead branch of Makro in Gauteng launched its collection point in August this year and collected 3.7 tons of e-waste in the first month. Collection points are also being set up in other provinces.
Another, more recent, initiative is one by Nokia which will soon be available in at least 20 locations around the country. The sites will provide boxes for owners of old mobile phones to deposit them for recycling. Nokia at this point won’t recycle the phones locally but will ship them overseas for processing.
At the other end of the scale, Sun Microsystems South Africa also offers a recycling opportunity to its customers. Sun server hardware tends to be big and very expensive so instead the hardware gathering dust in a corner Sun covers the costs of removing the hardware and shipping it overseas for recycling. And because customers have invested significant money in the old hardware, Sun negotiates a discount on new Sun hardware in exchange for the old hardware. Interestingly, Sun will remove and recycle any server hardware – irrespective of brand – when it is replaced with Sun servers.
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