Willie Cade, an adjunct professor in industrial design, is co-chair of the United Nations Basel Convention committee on environmentally sound refurbishment of used computing equipment. The week of Oct. 15, Cade and the convention's governing body, the Congress of the Parties, meet in Cartagena, Colombia, to ratify new guidelines for reusing computers across international borders. In the spring semester, he will teach a multidisciplinary graduate course on e-waste. Cade spoke recently with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Dusty Rhodes about the protocol and the environmental effects of new electronics.
Why do we need new guidelines?
We've defined what it means to refurbish computers in a way that's environmentally sound, so that we're preventing further destruction of the environment. This accord is what 172 signatory countries will use when there's a cross-border shipment of used computing equipment for re-use. Right now, there's all kinds of people who scream and yell that this is dumping toxic electronic waste on Third World countries, but this is actually good sound working equipment.
It takes more than a ton of virgin ore and more than 1,000 gallons of water to manufacture a computer, and it uses a large array of critical metals that are in shorter and shorter supply these days. We have approximately 1.5 billion computers now in use throughout the world. If these computers can be tested and refurbished, it will slow the rate at which we have to buy new equipment and further degrade the environment. Plus it will help people in cost-effective ways.
What are some of the materials involved in making computers?
In any computer or cellphone, there are about 70 different elements, and some of the most critical are also the most valued, like gold, silver, copper, platinum and palladium. There's also arsenic, tin, lead, cadmium, tungsten and indium. Tungsten has about a 20- to 30-year known reserve supply in the world, and there are no recycling furnaces recovering tungsten from their waste stream. Indium, which is element 49 on the periodic table, allows us to make touchscreen monitors and iPhones, and there's about a 20-year known reserve of indium. If we run out of it, we go back to CRTs.
What can average consumers do to use electronics more responsibly?
Well, there are about 1 billion computers on the planet running Windows XP. If they're upgraded to Windows 7, they'll last another five years, and you'll get the same kind of performance out of them that you would get with a new computer, if you're an average user. An average user is using his or her computer to do the following tasks: access the Internet and exchange email. Period. So if we didn't have to replace those billion computers, it would be a good thing.
The other thing that's really interesting is that only 27 percent of the average hard drive storage area is used, and that percentage is going down because the denominator is getting larger and larger, and many people are using the Cloud. There's an urban myth that says if you want to recycle the hard drive, the more times you "wipe" the data off it, the better, and that's actually not true. The problem with running a hard drive with a heavy load like data wiping for hours on end is - it destroys the hard drive. If we're smart about this, we can fully utilize this treasured resource.
What's it like serving on a UN committee?
I found out if you don't take a step back when they ask for volunteers, they make you chair of the committee. We have worked on these guidelines for three years. In December, we were in Beijing editing this document sentence by sentence. It must've been 50 degrees in that room; literally I was in my winter coat. I mean, we have worked hard on this!
So what kind of electronics do you and your family members use?
We have refurbished printers, monitors and servers. My cellphone is a T-Mobile Dash, with no touch screen. It's probably a 4-year-old smart phone, so it's barely smart. But it meets my needs and does what I want it to do, so I'm a happy camper. Everybody else in the family uses iPhone 3Gs, but they were used when we bought them. I walk the walk.