It's time to deal with the e-junk in our backyards

The economic downturn will change my consumption habits, but for the time being I have a load of electronic junk.

There are three laptops my children and I cycled through and found not up to the task of broadband downloads. I have a full desktop unit, at no small expense only four years ago, that slowed down when I ventured into uploading and watching video. A monitor. A printer. Cables galore. Old cell phones. Even an old PDA. Oh, and the television sets, those unbearably heavy and deep versions I felt so humbled to own only a few years ago and can’t give away today. If I go back a little further, there are the speakers, the receiver, the CD player, the (gasp) turntable, and the amplifier.

All superfluous, now that I’ve got an iPod, a good laptop, a small desktop, a BlackBerry, and a backup hard drive. My sense is that in a couple of years those implements will feel unnecessary, too, when cloud computing takes hold and all my data are with some entity online.

I don’t think I’m alone, but I have friends who have thought nothing of just walking their e-junk to the bin and tossing it out as if it were the remnants of cooked leftovers. I’ve been paralysed for some time trying to find an ethical solution to dispose of my gear.

I want to find a place that will cleanse my hard drive so I don’t fall prey to someone after my personal data (a significant enough matter), but also a place that won’t send the raw components into harm’s way environmentally (a vastly more significant matter).

I have to say, the more I look, the less I like about the latter challenge. The rise of e-waste has given rise to entrepreneurial geek outfits that take your gear and either refurbish it or dismantle it. But more and more e-disposal companies are being tracked and found wanting in their handling of the more harmful waste inside our electronics. With very little thinking, we are either pumping the e-waste into landfill or letting it become another country’s problem, where it still pollutes and harms.

It isn’t supposed to be so. The promise of environmental industries is that they are capable of addressing many of our toxic challenges ethically and affordably. Indeed, the myth of the green movement is that it’s costly. But on one frontier — the one that hits home for me as I dispose of my belongings and move to another generation of tech — the ethical conundrum remains. We aren’t finding clear-cut ways to hand over our e-waste and keep a clear conscience in the process.

Both 60 Minutes and CBC News have found culprits in some of the most avowedly advertised ethical disposal companies. At my paper some time ago, we found malfeasance in an industry preaching far better than it practiced in ethical disposal of electronics. We were getting tips that e-waste was being shipped surreptitiously to Asia in violation of export bans and that local oversight was negligible. Since then, some institutions locally have had to scout new e-disposal companies because of similar concerns.

I remain surprised that we keep a loose hand on this area when we have correctly found regulations on the transportation and handling of hazardous substances in other fields. That we have jurisdictions in Canada with self-regulation is outrageous in the 21st century. The problem is analogous to our earliest pollution problems, but it surely shouldn’t be taking us long to find a solution this time around, with so many other solutions found.

Kirk LaPointe is the managing editor of the Vancouver Sun.

Photo by Stephen Mackenzie. Courtesy of Creative Commons.