Posted on: Friday, July 29, 2005

E-waste problem demands attention

	HOW TO DO YOUR PART Here are some computer recycling options: The City and County of Honolulu partners with CompUSA and Computers for Kids in a twice-yearly computer drop-off event at the Ala Moana CompUSA parking lot. The next one is set for Make a Difference Day, Oct. 22. Both working computers and broken ones are accepted on that date. Year-round, Computers for Kids will take certain computers that are given to public schools and nonprofits: Pentiums 3 and 4, Celeron and Macintosh G3 and above. Computers that need minor repairs are acceptable. Donations also can include 17-inch working monitors and any peripheral with a USB port. Call 521-2259 for more information. Mutual Assistance Association Center-Hawai'i in Palolo Valley will accept Pentium 2 and above; broken computers are acceptable, but all the parts need to be there. Repaired computers are used in classes for Palolo kids, and then given to the students. Call 737-9633 for more details. Other ideas: see the city's recycling Web site (www.opala.org). Under Quick Find, select Computer Recycling.

Nothing exemplifies the ingenuity and environmental headaches of the information age quite like personal computers.

We buy them, at constantly declining costs. Manufacturers come up with more capacity and snazzier upgrades, while software writers come up with more elaborate uses for them.

And almost as quickly as consumers can say "planned obsolescence," they feel driven to buy a new computer, and get rid of the old one.

HAZARDOUS WASTE

Society is struggling to cope with "e-waste" — the growing number of PCs put out to pasture — largely because that "pasture" too often is the local landfill. The old cathode ray tube monitors, especially, are classified as hazardous waste because they contain about five pounds of lead, and that deadly substance can leach into groundwater systems from their resting places at municipal dumps.

Yet there doesn't seem to be a concerted effort to head off a crisis in a state that has every reason to worry about its water supply.

State Sen. Will Espero has tried in vain to set up a task force to evaluate various strategies. With good reason, he's perplexed by his idea's failure to get traction.

Indeed, e-waste is everybody's concern.

Many people clearly recoil at the idea of sending computers to the dump, particularly when there's still life in them. Among them are the people who streamed through the CompUSA parking lot in May, the most recent of the semi-annual computer recycling events where tons of the old PCs were dragged out from closets and garages.

COMMUNITY RESOLVE

This is a collaborative effort by the store, the city and the nonprofit Hawaii Computers for Kids program, so clearly there's some community resolve to put usable computers into the hands of those who need them and keep them out of the waste stream.

Still, more needs to be done.

Older computers often are shipped to Asian markets for rebuilding or salvage; how long do we have before that demand dries up?

Costs of shipping computers to Mainland processing centers is high. Is there space in the sometimes half-empty containers heading back to the coast so that some of this might transport more cheaply?

Should retailers take on some of the recycling burden, charging a fee to help finance it? Some computer manufacturers, such as Dell, offer similar programs and incentives.

Perhaps private industry can find viable solutions.

But if nothing else, the state should bring the interested parties, public and private, to the table for a discussion. The time to give this problem serious study is now — not when it reaches mountainous proportions.