Our environment is in deep trouble. Do you want to be part of the solution and not part of the problem? To avoid being part of the problem don’t toss that supposedly outdated computer onto a landfill. Your discarded computer carcass will take decades to biodegrade and leach scads of poisonous chemicals into the environment during the process.
Several years ago the Utah Department of Environmental Quality estimated that by 2004 more than 300 million computers would be considered obsolete, generating well over 1 billion pounds of lead, 2 million pounds of cadmium, 1 million pounds of chromium, and 400,000 pounds of mercury. Municipal incineration is the largest point source of dioxins into the US and Canadian environments and among the largest sources of heavy metal contamination of the atmosphere. Of course the year 2004 is long gone, and these horrible numbers have undoubtedly been far surpassed in spite of efforts such as corporate trade-in programs.
Why do people toss their computers? That’s simple; given the computer industry’s unending performance advances there is a widespread perception that you can no longer DO anything worthwhile with your old computers. This dangerous assumption is simply not true.
