There's been a few milestones reached in the I.T world in the past few years. Hi-tech consultancy Gartner Dataquest reckons that 1 billion (that's UK Billion) Computers have been sold worldwide since their conception. The internet is 15 years old and the UK has just adopted the WEEE Directive, which is aimed at getting us poor English based I.T users to recycle our computers rather than just dump them in landfill.
So where's this all going? Well in Europe, it's now the responsibility of the manufacturer, producer and in some bizzare instances reseller to cough up the cost for recycling electrical and electronic equipment for the general consumer. This rather woolly directive has a number of loopholes, in particular with reference to recycling Business computers, but in essence, it could end up being costly for producers of I.T equipment and many manufacturers may be forced to cut their overheads by manufacturing (and possibly recycling) outside the West.
In the U.S. a growing problem is that of the toxicity of I.T. waste and the need to clean it up, but the downside to that, as cited by IT-Green in the UK, is that of export to countries more open to the idea of dealing with our toxic waste. China, India and West Africa have seen rapid growth in this particular industry and apart from the large landfills and deaths that will eventually result from un-regulated recycling, there's the issue of data theft and the plethora of identity theft that is now plaguing the West. Gartner's estimate of 1 billion Computer sales has so far resulted in a 'recycling headache' but, as cited by the BBC, 2 billion computers will have been manufactured by 2008.
This will, when coupled with China's rapid growth and thirst for natural resources, have a highly significant impact upon resources available to the West (and the resultant market prices of these dwindling materials). Similarly, we have to wonder who will deal with the toxic waste that includes Lead, Arsenic, mercury, PCBs and Phosphorous in pre 2005 hardware currently still in use and currently being dumped in someone else's back yard!
