serendipityoucity

I was at a workshop last week and saw a presentation on green broadband.  I have not deconstructed the models presented, but was a bit skeptical with the argument, particularly if the full production cycle and energy costs of the digital economy are not factored in. 

What of the energy consumption of server farms that give us 24-7 access to the Internet’s information? Hmm! I wonder if the models look at the energy costs of transporting waste to China or India, the health problems associated with the recovery and the environmental degration caused by this toxic soup! I desperately want to believe green broadband but …

The Globe has a great article about e-waste in China today.

The air smells acrid from the squat gas burners that sit outside homes, melting wires to recover copper and cooking computer motherboards to release gold. Migrant workers in filthy clothes smash picture tubes by hand to recover glass and electronic parts, releasing as much as 6.5 pounds of lead dust.

China now produces more than 1 million tons of e-waste each year, said Jamie Choi, a toxics campaigner with Greenpeace China in Beijing. That adds up to roughly 5 million television sets, 4 million fridges, 5 million washing machines, 10 million mobile phones and 5 million personal computers, according to Choi.

“Most e-waste in China comes from overseas, but the amount of domestic e-waste is on the rise,” he said.

This ugly business is driven by pure economics. For the West, where safety rules drive up the cost of disposal, it’s as much as 10 times cheaper to export the waste to developing countries.

Upwards of 90 per cent ends up in dumps that observe no environmental standards, where shredders, open fires, acid baths and broilers are used to recover gold, silver, copper and other valuable metals while spewing toxic fumes and runoff into the nation’s skies and rivers.

Accurate figures about the shady and unregulated trade are hard to come by. However, experts agree that it is overwhelmingly a problem of the developing world. They estimate about 70 per cent of the 20-50 million tons of electronic waste produced globally each year is dumped in China, with most of the rest going to India and poor African nations.

I do not see myself jumping on any green broadband bandwagon any time soon and worry about false rhetoric leading us to create worse problems or displacing the problems into someone else’s back yard. 

More Resources:

• GRID News Brief
  
• UN Seeks to Save Developing Countries from e-waste
• ‘E-Waste’ From Western Hand-Me-Downs Threatens Poor Countries: UN