It probably says a lot about how far we have come as a society that in 2008, environmental policy across business and government is not an afterthought or a footnote on an agenda to bear in mind. However when you consider that it has taken the erosion of our selfish liberties like how much water we are able to use and how much it is now costing us at the petrol bowser for us to reevaluate our priorities. This combined with the guilt of a movie like an 'Inconvenient Truth' and a Generation Y screaming for change now reach both voting age and positions of influence and financial clout that a true picture can really be seen.
We have now signed The Kyoto Protocol. Many say; "So What" as these two poignant questions still remain; Have we really done anything more than cosmetic change? And are we implementing change at a fast enough pace given our tardy start?
If we examine the technological industry minus the hysterics that often accompany these debates, one could draw the conclusion that little progress is being made at all.
One of our biggest issues is e-waste and we are all guilty of this pleasure fueling this problem. If you ponder a moment the 2000s and your own home circumstances as best as you can recall.In your household, how many TVs, mobile phones and computers have you owned collectively in this decade? As a rough guide the average modern middle class family averages a mobile phone per person in a home and replaces a phone once every two years. Then houses these days tend to have almost as many computers (particularly if you include gaming consoles like Nintendo Wii or Sony Playstation) as household members and updating these every 3 years or so.
Finally TVs, partly due to the lowering of costs over the past 15 years and the rapid advances in technology, are also being replaced more often than 15 years ago.In the case of mobile phones and computers particularly, the resale value of an 'old' device (i.e. 2 years for phone, 3 years for computer) is so low and technology advances so rapid that devices themselves become redundant means that in the most part this all becomes E-Waste! So if you extrapolate all those figures across all the households in your neighbourhood, let alone Australia wide or globally, it equates to a lot of sizeable and toxic waste and you may wonder where this all ends up.
Money is a powerful and persuasive tool and like many of our business problems we face today, we outsource it. For the better part of this decade, old computers particularly have been shipped to 3rd world countries like Asia where cheap village labor strips the old parts for usable materials like tin or copper causing both visable and untold damage to the local environment and ultimately the inhabitants. While steps have been made as the decade has progressed to recycle old devices, the energy and pollutant costs in establishing such facilities may outweigh the overall benefit.
What can you do?
Well you can control where you make your purchases as 2006 Greenpeace study showed that Nokia and Dell rated most highly for eliminating toxic waste in their products and having sound e-waste management policies. Surprisingly Apple, often lauded for being innovative and cutting edge, rated near the bottom along with Lenovo (IBMs notebook partner) and Motorola. Australian company 1800 EWaste claims to be the nations biggest computer recycler and come to your place of business or home to pickup old devices. As mentioned with these types of services earlier, you should bear in mind the recycling policies of the company and where and how things are done. Alternatively donating old devices to schools, community centers and groups, charities (both national and international) and even within your family or social groups can put perfectly good devices to continued use.
Finally using resources like Greener Computing, organisations, government bodies and individuals can develop longer term e-waste management solutions so the entire purchase, usage and disposal cycle is following an overall environmental plan to ensure that other important issues like energy efficiency and pollution levels are also accounted for in your decisions.
If nothing else, the most pertinent point to digest from all of this is that, Kyoto means little without individual and collective action. This action as stated does not need to be that much or even that revolutionary and begins with just awareness of the issue. Ask yourself if that .50 per hour that the villagers in Asia are being reportedly paid to sort through your Waste is something you want to live with now and for your children's future?
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