Alex Little

The Guardian website has an article about whether it is better to dump old computer equipment or donate it to charity (possibly for sending out to developing countries).
Seems a crazy argument to me that PCs, laptops etc. shouldn’t be donated (and instead be dumped), the reasoning given is that extending their lifetime would increase emissions, due to:

subsequent e-missions – the greenhouse gases incurred by the internet itself

This appears to ignore the fact that if a PC or laptop isn’t donated, then the organisation might buy new equipment anyway.

Although I don’t agree with dumping old equipment, I have reservations about sending developing countries what to Europe/US is old or obsolete equipment, but expecting it to be good enough for poorer countries. In some situations, yes it may be that something is better than nothing, but in others it feels very wrong to expect people/countries to develop properly using others’ cast offs.

For example, where I’ve been working, the department is very short of computers (with rapidly increasing student numbers), but computer science students cannot gain good practical computer skills (many students have hardly used a computer before starting their degree) on a 6 or 7 year old PC with 128 Mb Ram attempting to run XP.

As an aside, another factor in donated equipment is that some countries put up barriers on allowing computer equipment to be imported. For example, Ethiopia applies a 100% import tax on any electrical equipment. I’m not sure if other countries impose similar taxes.

[Image from Extra Ketchup: http://www.flickr.com/photos/extraketchup/737490219/]