[Wolves] Indymedia - environmental cost

[sparkes]

David Goodwin wrote:
>> "According to the study, the manufacturing of one desktop computer and
>> 17-inch CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor requires at least 240 kilograms
>> of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of chemicals and 1,500 kilograms of
>> water. In terms of weight, the total amount of materials used is about
>> equal to that of a mid-size car.
>>
>
> Is that mainly the CRTs fault?

CRT's make up the bulk of the heavy metals end users are left with but
the manufacture and delivery of CPU's and circuit boards use thousands
of different nasty chemicals.

This is why manufacturers move the nasty stuff abroad.  The sad thing
people think it's all about jobs and hourly wages when it's really about
dumping your toxins on a developing country and have them pay you in tax
breaks for the privledge.

The best thing you can do is pass things on to someone else when you
don't use them.  The mean failure rate is such that most IT equipment is
still working when you dump it.  The power consumption of computers
drops almost every year (until someone adds new devices and more hungry
graphics cards to the mix) but never enough to really justify dumping
your old one and getting a new one but almost all of us to this most years.

Buddy MrBen blogged about this last week.

http://www.jedimoose.org

And http://a2rt.org (at least one and maybe two of the Nursery school
collective) have some excellent stuff, plus old lug friend James in
Sheffield with http://lowtech.org and Welsh nutters
http://www.fraw.org.uk who got sued by friends of the earth for being
too cool, not middle class and giving a f**k ;-)  That last one has some
gems for people into computers and the environment.


>
> David.
>

sparkes
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