Communications of the ACM
Technological Garbage
Users around the world tend to forget how dangerous a new technology can be to the environment and themselves.
Every new technology is designed to solve a problem but at the same time creates many others, especially in the field of environmental impacts and their consequences on human health.
This is particularly true for computers and their associated technologies, many of us do not care about the final place for things as cell phone batteries, crt monitors, printer cartridges, cell phones, printers and more.
Traditionally Latin countries has been using open pit garbage dumps as their way to dispose of garbage, for obvious reasons this is not the optimal way to get rid of the of it due to its ecological and health implications.
With the improvement of the life quality on many countries of the region, per capita income has increased and thus the consumption of technology has also increased; this brings the problem of the disposal of this technology and what is the final disposal location?, no other than the traditional open pit garbage dumps.
This situation is creating new risks to the environment and human health, not only because of the locally generated garbage but the imported one. Countries around the world are using emerging economies and third world countries as their final place for this new kind of garbage, this is a world wide tendency and local authorities with corruption problems find an enrichment opportunity with no care (or ignorance) about the problems generated by this situation.
People of many Latin countries concerned about the risks and the situation with this new threat to the environment and their health started private initiatives to control and properly dispose this garbage, also some countries had started timid public initiatives with private support to properly recycle and dispose the garbage.
Some of these initiatives include the location of recycle cans on the offices of main cell phone companies were users can dispose their old cell phones and their accessories in order to get properly disposed.
Other initiatives make use of old computers to overhaul them and deliver to remote regions of a country in order to provide access to new technologies to poor or low resource people, this initiative was already mentioned in a previous post.
But this group of initiatives makes little effect, in many cases there are no official decrees or government rules related to garbage disposition or garbage recycling at all, for this reason every user must be aware of the risks involved when a cell phone is dropped to the garbage can, but as previous posts mentioned, many users have little or no knowledge on the proper use of the technology, both during is working life spam as after that.
As a conclusion, no single country is really prepared to deal with this situation, private companies must assume the cost of final disposition of their devices and every user must be educated on how to dispose its garbage.
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