Where Is Away? Or, What Happens When You Flush the Toilet.

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Where Is Away? Or, What Happens When You Flush the Toilet.

10/12/2005

By Terry Calhoun

And perhaps more importantly, what happens when campus IT throws away old PCs.

Well, the answer is that there is no “away.” Just like the social construction of “race,” which for human beings really has no scientific biological sense but is a real social force due to the often subconscious beliefs (social facts) of humans in various societal contexts, there really is no such place as “away” as used in the term “throw away.” Yet we all use the term and, until a certain level of maturity is reached, young people may even assume there is such a place.

Yesterday, as I tried to catch up on my time tracking in my day job at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), I swore a mild epithet when I realized that I had “thrown away” my paper record of what I had done in September. But I really hadn’t thrown it “away,” I had instead placed it in a blue recycle bin and it was on its way to being recycled, somewhere.

One of the most memorable phrases from the World War II era is “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” which referred, of course, to letting slip information about the timing of warship deployments to unauthorized people (girlfriends).

Nowadays when we think we throw something away, we are instead jeopardizing the ship on which we all travel through space, the Earth and its biosphere. Because, nothing d'es really get thrown away, it just ends up somewhere else. We even, sometimes, use up a lot of energy and resources taking it “somewhere else.” Often what we throw away is highly toxic, yet we think little about the fact that it d'esn’t just go “away” but ends up somewhere else, just like what happens when we flush the toilet.

Downstream waste.

Why should this concern information technology managers and workers? It’s because we design, manage, and use tools which are relatively small yet contain huge amounts of toxic materials. For example:

· Some computer screens contain up to eight pounds of lead, which we now know is highly poisonous;
· Inside a CPU, circuit boards soldered with tin contain mercury and cadmium, likewise toxic substances; and
· There’s more, but why belabor the point?

Between 1997 and 2007, we will probably have disposed of, “thrown away,” more than half a million computers, for an estimated total of 1.5 billion pounds of lead, 3 million pounds of cadmium, and more than 600,000 pounds of mercury. And those estimates were made before the huge growth in popularity of even smaller (and more plentiful) devices such as PDAs and cell phones.

And, to compound the problem for electronics, much of what we use is designed for obsolescence, so these densely-toxic products we call computers last maybe 2-5 years and then we buy new ones . . . and throw the old ones “away.” Actually, an amazing number of used computers are warehoused somewhere, which means that we still have a chance to dispose of them properly. But even so, if you go around campus looking inside dumpsters I’ll bet that you can find a computer or two peeking back out at you without wasting too much time!