Your computer packs up and, rather than change its hard disc, you opt for a spanking new model. An office replaces its outdated PCs with modern, more sophisticated ones. Stop and think of how the old, discarded computers will be dealt with. Will they end up in landfills as techno trash, poisoning the earth with heavy metals?

A study says making the average PC requires 10 times the weight of the product in chemicals and fossil fuels. Many of the chemicals are toxic, while the uses of fossil fuels help contribute to global warming. And the short lifetime of today's IT equipment leads to mountains of waste, the UN University report says. That waste is then dumped in landfill sites or recycled, often in poorly managed facilities in developing countries, leading to significant health risks.

The authors say that both manufacturers and computer users across the world should be given greater incentives to upgrade or re-use computer hardware instead of discarding it.
The United States and other Western nations are using poorer countries as dumping grounds for their tech waste, creating environmental and health hazards for which they refuse responsibility.

In a scathing report entitled "Exporting Harm: The Techno-Trashing of Asia," the groups document what they claim is the damage being done to the land and people in Third World and Asian nations by the West's technological waste.

Whereas Western nations insist they are recycling their technology waste when shipping it overseas, the report says the process is more akin to dumping, chronicling the pile-up and contamination fueled by the export of hundred of thousands of consumer goods and computer components.

The United States is the only developed nation that has refused to sign the Basel Convention, a 1989 United Nations treaty calling on countries to sharply limit the export of hazardous waste.

Computer manufacturers need to develop an efficient collection program for the recovery and recycling of hazardous electronic products and their disposal to protect public health, worker safety and the environment.

All electronic devices should be labeled according to a recyclable or disposable process and maintained or funded by their manufacturers. Legislators should call for a categorization of the e-waste impact and classify each electronic element according to its hazard and how it should be recycled or disposed.

An estimated 30 million computers are thrown out, organic pollutants and all, in the United States every year. Of those, only about 14 percent are recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. “Electronic equipment is one of the largest known sources of heavy metals, toxic materials, and organic pollutants in municipal trash waste” said Leslie Byster, a spokeswoman for Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a nonprofit group in California that studies computer industry waste. "

When the inhabitants of Guiyu (a village in southeast China) were told seven years ago that their poor rice-growing village was to become part of the booming US technology sector, they couldn’t believe their luck.

Much of the peasants working lives had been spent toiling in paddy field and the prospect of being employed in one of the world’s fastest-growing industries raised hopes of an end to subsistence living. But in the years that have passed those dreams have given way to a living nightmare. The Guiyu of today is a village of contaminated waterways and polluted air; whose houses are covered with thick layers of toxic ash and streets littered with huge piles of poisonous waste.

Many of its inhabitants suffer from respiratory illnesses, skin infections or stomach diseases. Drinking water is so polluted that it has to be trucked in from a town, 30 km away. The reason — Guiyu has become a dumping ground for the US toxic technology waste, imported directly from California’s Silicon Valley, the capital of the world’s hi-tech industry.

Into the environment and find their way into water supplies. Some people wash vegetables and dishes with the polluted water and they get skin problems.
Citing independent studies, the report estimates that the USA will have 500 million obsolete computers to discard by 2007 — that means 717 million kg of lead, 1.36 million kg of cadmium and 2, 87,000 kg of mercury, all ready to be exported.
The electronics industry is the world’s largest and fastest-growing manufacturing industry and as a consequence of this growth, e-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream in the industrialized world. Similar e-waste dumps and makeshift recycling huts have been found in Karachi in Pakistan and in New Delhi, India.

In America, up to 80 per cent of what the country terms ‘recyclable’ electronics waste is sent to Asia and rather than trying to stop the practice, the US government is actively encouraging it, the report claims. The United States is the only industrialized country that has not ratified the Basel Convention, a United Nations environmental treaty that bans the export of hazardous waste to developing nations.

Though the US does have controls on the transfer of hazardous substances yet material considered ‘recyclable’ are not regulated by the authorities. This way allows recycling companies to dump e-waste on other countries without fear of prosecution. While the US gives a good talk about the principle of environmental justice at home for their own population, they work actively on the global stage in direct opposition to it.