Dr. Dobb's Journal November 1997
When it's time to buy a new computer, the biggest question most of us face doesn't have anything to do with the amount of RAM, size of monitor, or capacity of hard disk. No, the real pecan to crack is what to do with your old PC.
Of course, if you're Nam June Paik, the answer is easy. You spray paint everything day-glo orange, hot-glue it together, and call it art. Paik, who's been canonized in the San Jose Mercury News as the "internationally recognized father of video art and originator of the term 'electronic super highway,'" sees new images and relationships in the ether where art and technology intersect. His vision has been assembled in a three-year, cross-country road show called "Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the 90's [sic]." After stops in Kansas City, Ft. Lauderdale, Philadelphia, San Jose, and elsewhere, the exhibition wraps up at the Honolulu Academy of Art in early January, 1998.
I'll leave it to art majors to the hash out what's art and what's not. Still, you can't help but marvel at Paik's world-class collection of old computers, VCRs, TVs (more than 500 of them), laser discs, remote-control clickers, cell phones, and enough neon lights to make Las Vegas look like a dim-witted cousin. Paik bolts all this junk together to create nonmobile robots with names like "Global Encoder" and "Couch Potato," and wall-mounted masks called "Internet Dwellers" -- all of which inhabit a "Cybertown" with police, post office, school, and more.
Since most of us aren't as talented as Paik, we're stuck with old PCs collecting dust in the closet. Of course, there are people who see a $1.95 bookmark instead of a discarded 1×6-inch printed-circuit board, and a $9.95 clipboard, rather than a useless 9×13 motherboard. And then there are those clocks made out of everything from circuit boards to CD-ROMs.
One good thing about all these geegaws, gimcracks, and whirligigs is that they keep obsolete electronic devices -- built from lead and other toxic elements -- out of landfills. Unquestionably, old computers and related electronic junk are beginning to be create an Excedrin-size environmental headache. According to a recent report from Carnegie Mellon University, more than 55 million computers in the U.S. will end up in landfills by the year 2005. All in all, CMU researchers H. Scott Matthews, Chris T. Hendrickson, and Francis T. McMichael (authors of "Disposition and End of Life Options of Personal Computers," CMU Green Design Initiative Technical Report #97-10) project that approximately 325 million PCs in the U.S. will become obsolete between 1985 and 2005. In addition to the 55 million in landfills, 143 million will be recycled (that is, components such as glass, plastic, and metal returned to their original state for reuse), with the remaining 127 million computers either reused or stored. Keep in mind that the CMU study deals only with computers, ignoring VCRs, fax machines, TVs, and similar consumer-electronics products.
Computer recycler/refurbishers are rushing to fill the void, instead of the landfills. With offices in the U.S. and Scotland, for instance, Randy Frazier (http://www.rfrazierus.com/) has more than 230 employees worldwide who test, repair, refurbish, and resell electronic products, primarily to the developing nations. More than 80 percent are repaired and resold, 15 percent are recycled, and less than 5 percent are disposed of as waste.
For their part, manufacturers are slowly coming around, environmentally speaking. Dell's Optiframe Chassis family of PCs, for instance, has a recycled content of 25 percent (or more) and has been designed to be easily recyclable. (Dell adopted the German "Blue Angel" environmental standard a couple of years ago.) Interestingly, Dell claims these machines cost less to make than standard PCs because the easy-to-dismantle design translates to reduced assembly-line time.
On the recycling front, NEC has launched a printed-circuit board recovery system called the "Ecoseparation System," which heats boards to the solder's melting point, and removes the solder and surface-mounted or through-hole parts. The system then pulverizes the resin board and uses high-voltage electrostatic to separate copper and glass-fiber resin powders.
When it comes down to it, however, the best thing to do with old PCs is to donate them to one of the many nonprofit computer recycling centers across the nation. In turn, volunteers refurbish the systems and distribute them at no cost to schools. In addition to hardware, most centers accept software, books, and any volunteer time you can share. (About the only thing they don't want are broken monochrome monitors.) The Computer Recycling Center in the Santa Clara, California, for instance, has provided schools with more than 20,000 computers. There are dozens of similar operations across the nation. For the one closest to you, check out http://www.crc.org/. If nothing else, putting a computer in a student's hands will keep it out of Nam June Paik's.
--Jonathan Erickson