take some E waste stats & redefine what you know

Submitted by Zebra Mussel on Thu, 03/08/2007 - 19:59.
take some E waste stats & redefine what you know

A growing share of municipal waste contains electronic or electric products. E-waste is one of the fastest growing waste streams and makes up approximately 4 per cent of municipal waste in the European Union. In the US, between 14 and 20 million PC’s become obsolete every year. The picture is similar all over the world and e-waste is increasing steadily.

  1. What kinds of waste 2 revenue opps lie buried in this fairly haz mound of trash?
  2. Could this Flight Level 400 type information be benificial to a business model with an industrial ecology slant?
  3. Is one mans trash truely another mans treasure?    or Theres gold in them thar circut boards!

data source:
What is e-waste?. (2006). In UNEP/GRID-Arendal Maps and Graphics Library.

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E-Waste is about to explode

Submitted by Norm Roulet on Fri, 03/09/2007 - 13:16.

Excellent issues raised here, ZM. Considering the rapid movement to planned obsolescence for so much technology, E-Waste is about to explode. All TVs in America must be digital, forcing scrap of 1,000,000s of TVs that may never be used again. VHS... all to trash. DVDs - soon to trash (so the recording industry can use closed, secure standards). God help you if you want to upgrade an old PC to Vista - 1,000,000s of PCs to trash. Hey, could this be the landfill we need for those water-based wind turbines?

On the bright side, many new technologies are more energy efficient - but I imagine that just like with buildings the savings from energy efficiency does not make up for the embedded energy that went into making the less efficient model being displaced.

At least with computers there is a solution... we are all better off getting away from Microsoft and moving to Linux, which can run on lower-end machines, so we do not need to replace our computers, but just the operating system... and all that requires is one little old CD. For those who want the latest and greatest, all their déclassé PCs can go to the needy, so PC buyers can make sure their old equipment lives on with new lives.

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