If the Quincy garbage dump is ever declared a toxic waste site by the federal
government, I'll be partly to blame.
In last week's column, I mentioned recently tossing an old monitor of mine into the trash.
The same day, an e-mail arrived from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental
Affairs. The state's chief waste watcher, Bob Durand, wasn't pleased with me.
You probably know that the cathode ray tubes in TV sets and most computer monitors fire a
stream of electrons to draw pictures on the screen. Why aren't those same electrons
bombarding you? Because the screen is lined with lead - cheap, tough, plentiful, and
poisonous,especially to young children.
Tossing out a monitor means dumping toxic lead into a local landfill. Worse yet, it might
be fed to an incinerator, where the flames will vaporize the lead and send it wafting out
a smokestack and into some little girl's lungs. Then there are the computers themselves.
Microelectronics are richly salted with toxins - mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and
also lead. So my careless disposal of an old monitor could have grim consequences down the
road.
Which is why doing what I did with my old monitor will be illegal in Massachusetts come
April. Instead, we'll have to discard old computers the same way we dump old refrigerators
- by having a special waste hauling service pick them up, or carry them to an approved
recycling center. For more information on safe places to dump a PC, go to the
Massachusetts government Web site at www.state.ma.us.
The monitor was well and truly dead; otherwise I'd have kept it. But corporations and
organizations routinely toss out millions of computers and monitors that work perfectly,
but have become obsolete. Durand said 500,000 tons of old computer gear will be discarded
in the next five years, in Massachusetts alone.
A handful of machines are going to community organizations that fix them up and sell them
cheap to schools, nonprofits, and poor families. Unfortunately, one such outfit, the
East-West Education Development Foundation, is quitting the business. High rents drove it
out of its 15,000-square-foot warehouse on the Boston waterfront. It now has a much
smaller location, and foundation president Steven Farrell says, ''We have found it simply
physically impossible to refurbish sufficient equipment in a week's time to meet our
expenses.''
Some others are still hanging on. Mindshare Collaborative, a South Boston group,
refurbished 75 computers last month, reselling them for about $245 each, to cover the cost
of the upgrade. Mindshare can be reached at 617-787-7870. But don't try to saddle them
with some old Intel 386 machines you bought in 1989. Mindshare and most other such
operations will only accept relatively new PCs with a Pentium processor or better. Older
PCs or Apple Macintosh computers are too slow or incompatible for use even by poor folks.
And the nonprofits can't keep up with all the newer computers being thrown away after just
a couple of years' use.
This problem would have seemed like a splendid opportunity to my late father. He sold
second- and third-hand stuff at Chicago's Maxwell Street flea market, where his motto was,
''That's not junk, that's merchandise!'' Maybe not to you or me, but to somebody,
somewhere.
China, for instance. Every month, Michael Tobias of Seattle fills four 40-foot shipping
containers with computers and monitors and ships them off to Chinese buyers. ''Once there
they'll be Frankensteined together into some usable computers,'' says Tobias, founder of
Next Generation Environmental Service LLC (www.nextgenenvironmental.com), which collects
old PCs at 10 locations nationwide.
''From one company alone,'' says Tobias, ''I'm getting rid of 40,000 systems.'' He charges
about $25 per monitor and $20 per computer. Some companies insist that their machines be
destroyed and the parts recycled; others just want them gone, and these are the machines
that end up in China.
But the world is producing computers even faster than China is producing computer users.
In the long run, we'll either have to recycle all our old computers, or go back to using
the biodegradable kind - pencils and paper.
By Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe Columnist, 1/13/2000