Blog action day: E-waste, the downside of the growing web

October 15, 2007

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Greenpeace IndiaToday is blog action day and this year’s topic is environment. Thousands of bloggers will devote their writing skills to create more awareness to our threaten environment. I decided to write about e-waste (electronic waste). As Internet grows everyday, so does the demand for electronic equipment that preserves and extends the access to the Internet. Unfortunately, personal computers, laptops and mobile phones do not only have heavy toxic parts, their life span is mostly very short. The waste ends in places where people cannot protect themselves from the toxins, but have to recycle them as an income. Every year, hundreds of thousands of old computers and mobile phones are dumped in landfills or burned in smelters.

Some statistics

  • Electronic waste represents 2 percent of America’s trash in landfills, equal to 70 percent of overall toxic waste (wikipedia)
  • It is estimated that the US alone exports 80 percent of its e-waste to China, India and Pakistan. (treehugger)
  • Germany has a yearly dumb of over 1 million tons of e-waste, which is over 13 kilos per person.
  • Only 11% of PCs are recycled; the percentage for televisions and mainframes recycled is even lower. (ITfact)

The growing e-waste has consequences especially on the poor because all sorts of electronic waste is legally or illegally dumped in developing countries. It is not only computers but also vacuum cleaners, cables and all other sorts of appliances and electronic equipment. Greenpeace campaigns against the producers of laptops requesting them to use less toxic parts and obliged them to offer a recycle mechanism. Electronic waste is a valuable source for secondary raw materials if treated properly. But the recycling of e-waste is done very basically with tremendous health risks for workers (check out the photo from Greenpeace India).

Most e-waste goes to Asia, especially India and China, but growing amounts go to Africa. Here are some sources, which describe the difficult situation in different countries:

Check out the following video to see how drastic the situation is and find out that in the US it is unfortunately still legal to export e-waste to other countries. E-Waste: Dumping on the Poor (Asia Society)

And last but not least, here you can find some tips to avoid e-waste: Green E-Waste Tips

Do new web applications benefit the poor?

June 4, 2007

I was curious when an article titled Web 2.0 can benefit the world’s poor appeared on Scidev.net. The authors Waleed al-Shobakky and Jack Imsdahl see in new web applications, such as Google docs, a great potential for developing countries. They write, “Web 2.0 can help these students create documents, track their families’ or villages’ business affairs in spreadsheets and save and store data online. Users only need access to the Internet to benefit from these applications.”

No doubt these applications will change the old concept of purchasing software for each computer. But what is the real benefit of having documents online? I think these applications have great potential to collaborate. But the article doesn’t stress enough the “capacity crisis” that developing countries are facing in the context of information and communication technologies. In Africa problems of simple training to use computers, affordable access, and having enough bandwidth, need to be solved. Furthermore, these online applications need instant access to the Internet which is only available to a minority.

CollageA more helpful approach is open office, so people can work without an Internet connection. Another one is Jahazi, which has developed a USB flash stick full of applications. Also, Google wants to bridge this connectivity challenge with its latest tool called Gear, which will allow to work with online content while being offline.

But what strikes me the most about the article is that it leaves out the biggest opportunities about web2.0 and development. The potential lies in its users and what they do with these tools to communicate, share knowledge and create social media. New social networks are established online, which facilitate interaction and collaboration in an unprecedented way. Blogs, wikis or free sources are the drivers of web2.0.

The authors see language as an obstacle, but on the contrary, I believe that web2.0 with its open source dimension offers software in all kinds of languages (e.g. wordpress and drupal). This is a key factor to create own communities in local or regional contexts (e.g. the union of the Urban Poor from Indonesia, Afrigator, Egypt blog review). However, to which extent this can benefit the poor, will be further discussed on the web2fordev conference.

Crossposted: blog.web2fordev.net

Fair trade laptop - an extra 30 euro would be enough

May 12, 2007

Fair trade coffee is widely known and successful, but what about fair trade computers? This was the question of a session at the re-publica conference back in April with Frithjof Schmidt (member of the European parliament) and Andrea Manhart from the Ökoinstitut in Freiburg (ecological institute).

The labour conditions of workers, who manufacture notebooks in China are burdensome. Environmental problems of the production process are widespread as well. “A price raised of 30 euros would significantly improve these conditions,” says Andreas Manhart in a pioneer study (German) titled “Social implications of laptop production.” Other interesting findings from the study were:

  • Despite rising commodity costs, laptop prices have fallen continuously throughout the last years. Production has been changed to locations such as China.
  • Almost all laptop brands are produced by eleven Taiwanese firms, like Qanta, Compal or Wistron, who have the right manufacturing knowledge.
  • The cost of labour is not higher than 30 euro per laptop.
  • The ongoing competition between laptop sellers reduced the profit margin to 3% in average.

NGOs give now more emphasis to the problem of toxic waste. Greenpeace started a campaign with a green electronic guide ranking of laptops. As a consequence to ngo lobbying Apple announced last week “a greener apple” campaign, which promises more recycling efforts and the removing of toxic chemicals . The two blogs greenguy and being the change have a coverage on that.

But a fair trade approach also includes the social implication of laptop production. Its goal is to protect labour rights and guarantee environmental regulated production. A recent survey in Germany showed that many consumers are willing to buy fair trade laptops. Interestingly, A. Manhart said that a certification process does not necessarily bring the solution because it is impossible to monitor the widely distributed value-chain of laptop production especially in China.


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