Green Government

IT recycling

By Amelia Kwok | 3 August 2008

As awareness about toxic e-waste grows, more of the region’s government agencies are promoting the message of re-use and recycle.

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The flipside of ‘plug and play’ has been ‘replace and throw away’. As governments look to accommodate the rising environmental expectations of their citizens, hardware vendors need to ensure that they are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

The challenge of what to do with old hardware requires new thinking - learn what progressive agencies are doing in the region to manage environmental impact throughout the hardware lifecycle.

And the problem is urgent: Electronic waste is one of Asia’s fastest growing waste types. We discard 12 million tonnes of it every year. The problem is compounded by e-waste shipped in from developed countries looking to take advantage of lower recycling costs and cheap labour.

About five years ago, petroleum was a major source of lead pollution in India. Now, the recycling of e-waste - done by unprotected workers in backyard workshops - is a rising source of lead poisoning. Much of the e-waste comes from shipments of old computers donated by rich nations. Instead of being sent to schools or charities, they get bought by Indian recycling companies.

“Please do not donate any electronic goods to the developing countries. This form of charity is killing the children,” a Dr Thuppil Venkatesh, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at St. John’s Medical Centre in Bangalore, was quoted as saying. Today, 53 per cent of children under the age of 12 in India’s cities have some level of lead poisoning, which can impair brain functions.

On a global scale, Gartner thinks that by 2010, environmental issues will be among the top five IT management concerns for more than 50 per cent of state and local government organisations in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Australia.

Says Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio: “IT is at once a contributor to environmental problems and part of many solutions. Governments will need to deal with both aspects at the same time.”

A cautious approach There are two ways to approach the end-of-life cycle for electronic products. One seeks to recycle old or used products as a greener way of reducing waste; another seeks to reuse a product in a way that does not require energy to tear apart a computer or melting components into raw materials.

It makes sense that government agencies, being one of the largest users of IT hardware, would drive the adoption of recycling or the refurbishing of electronic products.

“Many would think that green IT is a private sector issue, but we firmly believe that government will create greater impact,” says Andrea Di Maio.

In Asia Pacific, some governments are taking the lead in making sure that hardware is kept out of landfills, or at least leave a small environmental footprint.

In the Philippines, the education ministry has been recycling electronic equipment. “Every three to four years, a computer becomes outdated. With three to six thousand school computer laboratories, it means numerous obsolete computers,” says Tim Diaz De Rivera, Director General, Commission on Information and Communications Technology, National Computer Center in The Philippines.

The schools have started a program which oversees the donation of the computers to a recycling agency in the south of the country. “The agency will extract metal components and recycle them,” says Rivera.

Rivera adds that the government also has plans to launch courses on PC repair and assembly in high schools. “Sometimes, only a portion of the computers are in working condition. If the students are able to put their knowledge to use, it will help reduce electronic wastage in their schools,” says Rivera

Is the effort justified? For some, recycling hardware hasn’t yet become an issue.

RS Sharma, Principal Secretary, IT Department, Government of Jharkhand in India, feel that agencies in nations such as India don’t need to worry yet. “Computer penetration is roughly 1 in 100 in India. Recycling e-waste is really not a main concern for us,” he says.

Government agencies also face difficulties in adopting green policies due to a conservative organisational structure and budget constraints, says Nauman Haque, research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group.

Asian companies that have corporate policies stating how their equipment and waste should be disposed do this not so much on a voluntary basis, but mostly due to pressure from US companies or the government, says David Chng, director of the Asia-Pacific region at CHWMEG, a non-profit trade association comprised of manufacturing and other industrial companies interested in efficiently supervising the waste management aspects of their environmental stewardship programmes.

The adoption rate for green IT in the public sector has been slow, admits Chng, adding that the lack of uniform regulations posed a problem. For example, in China, the regulations are different across provinces. A company may need to dispose of waste in another province with an approved waste management company, but doing so may involve paperwork, approval and time.

It is also unclear if recycling is cost-effective. In Europe and the US, electronic waste has to be sorted by hand before recycling, making the process costly. These countries end up shipping waste to Asia for hand-sorting. Hazardous substances such as lead and mercury poison the workers and end up in rivers or water streams.

Refurbishing electronics, rather than recycling them, has advantages. Energy does not get wasted; energy and natural resources are not required for PCs; the United Nations has estimated that recycling consumes 20 times more energy than reuse. Although PC refurbishment has been around for years, its uptake is not high, because electronic products tend to get cheaper over time.

Even donating old PCs to charitable organisations is not without controversy.

According to Deborah Elizabeth Finn, a consultant at the Technology for the Non-profit and Philanthropic Sector, non-profits that use donated hardware and software actually incur more cost compared with purchasing new.

“The cost in person-hours of using and maintaining non-standard or sub-standard configurations is astonishingly high, and donated equipment tends to be of poor standard,” she says in her blog.

Others may not agree; cash-strapped organisations can find donated equipment useful. However, care must to taken to make sure that the equipment works and is interoperable with current platforms.

RS Sharma, Principal Secretary, IT Department, Government of Jharkhand in India, says that for the last two years, government agencies throwing away old computers are asked to refurbish them and give them to schools.

The state program is coordinated by the Ministry of Human Resource Development Ministry, which oversees the education system from K1 up to K12 levels. Computers from government agencies will be sent to the HRDM, who will in turn disseminate them to schools.

Working out the bugs With these roadblocks to re-using and recycling old IT hardware, it’s not surprising that the U.S. and Canadian government agencies have been found to be the least concerned with being green, according to a research done by Info-Tech Research Group.

The study also discovered a stark difference between the public and private sector’s intentions and actions concerning energy efficiency and environmental responsibility. For example, in 2007, only 10 per cent of government officials felt a sense of urgency in implementing green efforts, compared to 49 per cent of IT professionals in the private sector.

But where motivation fails, legislation will step in. The European Union (EU) and four other states have already created mandatory e-waste recycling regulations. In Asia, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, the waste management and recycling industry is growing, thanks to extensive environment regulations. In contrast, the Philippines and Indonesia lack the basic legal infrastructure necessary to deal with domestic environmental issues.

The introduction of the EU Directive on Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is a European directive adopted in 2002 imposing financial responsibility for recycling and final disposal of electrical goods on manufacturers.

The directive is also applicable to imported goods. Under this law, producers of most electrical equipment are responsible for their products at the end of their useful life cycle. Some producer responsibilities include meeting labeling requirements and providing information and treatment facilities to end-users.

It’s therefore natural for IT executives to expect that vendors take on the green responsibility, says Philip Carter, Head of IDC’s Asia Pacific Green IT practice. He adds that 81 per cent of organisations feel that the ‘greenness’ of their IT suppliers would take on more importance over the next few years. Also, according to IDC’s Green Poll, the majority of the organisations currently do not have a green policy in place, suggesting that the idea has not quite gone mainstream.

Still, that hasn’t stopped some governments from taking the lead in reuse-recycle, mainly to prevent soil contamination.

The Australian Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA) estimated that 1.6 million PCs containing harmful substances such as lead and mercury were destined for landfill in 2007 in the country.

According to a spokesperson at the DEWHA, the Environment Protection and Heritage Council (EPHC), which comprises of Australia and New Zealand’s environment ministries, has “identified electrical and electronic wastes (including computers), as national priority wastes.” Prior to implementing a national computer recycling scheme, any recycling efforts in Australia on a large-scale basis have been primarily voluntary, says the spokesperson.

Currently, the department is funding work to identify the social and environmental benefits associated with product stewardship schemes. It’s working towards a national e-waste recycling scheme.

In New Zealand, the government has taken a “walk the talk” approach to recycling. According to Simon Hayes, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, “New Zealand government agencies have taken a leading position in dealing with e-waste, whether it is PCs, printers, servers or other forms of communications gear.”

“There is a clear understanding in the country’s public sector that the sort of toxic waste generated by used computer hardware can have a significant impact on the environment,” says Hayes.