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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Lead, mercury, chromium -- that's what computers are made of. So why aren't electronics makers keeping them out of landfills?
Sep 18, 2000 | I was packing 17 dead monitors; nine cannibalized Macintosh CPUs; six obsolete PCs; five printers; five fax machines; three flatbed scanners; six boxes of PCI cards and other stripped components; a garbage bag of cables; a dead Macintosh SE from 1991; a box full of brick-sized Seagate 2.9 GB SCSI drives, external CD-ROM drives, fried power supplies and failed memory; and a giant 21-inch Apple Studio Display crate filled with keyboards, office phones and miscellaneous plastics.
My U-Haul was headed to the Computer Recycling Center in Santa Clara, Calif., one of the few places within 75 miles of San Francisco that accepts cast-off computer equipment for disposal. I later learned of recyclers closer to home, though that morning the CRC was my only lead, and I confess to a certain thrill in returning my toxic e-junk to the county of its birth.
Our company's IT department, to which I belong, had conducted its usual triage on the castoffs collected during three years at a growing Internet company, salvaging what seemed useful and abandoning the rest. The dead matter was crammed into the truck and I was at the wheel.
Companies assume that system administrators, who seem to know everything else about computers, have information they don't about recycling electronics. The truth is that these monitors, printers and CPUs that silently disappear after a couple of months in a storage closet rarely make it to a recycler; instead they're sacrificed in a space crunch, hastily loaded on to a handcart and more often than not left outside the freight elevator with a stickie that says "Basura."
I'd recently come across a statistic, however, that pointed out that monitors contain an average of 5 to 8 pounds of lead per unit, thanks to the radiation shield in the cathode ray tube (CRT). It turns out it's worse than that: Lead constitutes approximately 25 percent of monitors by weight, and the estimate of 5 to 8 pounds per unit is based on 14- and 15-inch monitors. The standard-issue monitor today, at least for workers in the clean new economy, is 17-inch or above. In addition, lead is spackled across printed circuit boards as part of the soldering alloys that fuse electrical connections. It's no surprise that consumer electronics constitute 40 percent of the lead found in landfills.
Some reminders about lead: If ingested, it can have toxic effects on the central and peripheral human nervous systems, and cause brain damage in children. It can seep into groundwater, poisoning plants, animals and microorganisms. More than two decades after the U.S. government banned lead from house paint, the feds estimate that 4.4 percent of children between the ages of 1 and 6 suffer from lead poisoning, typically from tainted paint flaking off old walls. In short, it's a toxin, and doesn't belong in the dump.
Leave an old monitor by the freight elevator, however, and that's just where it's going. "If you landfill a CRT, it will get crushed in the process," says Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an organization founded in 1982 in response to a rising number of birth defects and other health problems near the leaking Fairchild Semiconductor plant in San Jose. "The fine particles of glass laced with lead eventually degrade. With rainfall getting into the dump site, the water will become contaminated with lead, and that lead-filled water will leach out of the landfill and into the groundwater." It's a process that may take several decades, but it will happen: It's as ineluctable as the flaking of paint.
"Lead is an element," Smith says. "It isn't going away. You can burn it, you can stomp on it, you can bury it; it isn't going away. It's going to get back into the life cycle."
