By SCOTT DEWING
Published: November 2003

They’re all either dead or too old to be useful anymore and it’s my job to prepare them for their final journey during which they’ll be completely disemboweled and any last traces of their memory will be erased. Some of their parts may go on to be used by others someday. The rest will be crushed or melted, broken down and returned to their most primitive state. When I look at them now in these final moments before they leave, I feel acutely mortal with the nagging knowledge that my fate is not so different, that time and entropy shall take their toll on me too and one day this structure, this body that people insist on calling “Scott”, will be broken down, scattered and returned to the vast space it mysteriously and miraculously sprang from. Who we are disappears, but what we are made of is all recycled in the end.

But for now, I’m standing in “The Boneyard” as we’ve come to call it. The Boneyard isn’t as scary as it may sound. It’s really just a large room, a classroom at a school in Southern Oregon where every last piece of the school’s defective or outdated technology has landed for the past decade. I know it’s been at least a decade because of the age of the computer equipment. In one corner is a pile of Apple Macintosh Classic II computers. Introduced in the fall of 1991, the Macintosh Classic II came standard with a whopping 2MB of RAM, a 40MB hard-drive and a 9” built-in monitor. And even though it sold for the low, low price of $1,900, it didn’t sell so well and was officially discontinued in the fall of 1993.

Now it’s fall of 2003 and down in The Boneyard we’ve got our work cut out for us. In addition to the pile of Macintosh Classics are stacks of old PCs in various shapes and sizes, but all with the same dull beige that has dominated the colorless computer industry ever since the release of the Apple II in 1977. There’s also monitors, printers and scanners as well as external hard-drives and CD-ROM drives that weigh at least 15 lbs and have the feel of a medieval weapon when carried by their adjoining 2-foot data cable. Most of the monitors are broken and have the word “BAD” scrawled on top of them in black or blue ink. The PCs have already been scavenged for various parts, their cases now loose and the fronts with dark gaping holes where the CD-ROM or floppy drives used to be. We have to open up each computer and remove the hard-drives and network interface cards. It’s monotonous and dirty work. The insides of the computers are filled with dust-bunnies the size of, well, bunnies, and you have to be careful or they leap out all over the table, blow apart and coat your nostrils with 10-year-old dust.

Everything is loaded onto 4’x4’ pallets surrounded by 4-foot high cardboard walls to form a bin. Once filled with discarded computers and peripherals, the bins will be loaded on a truck and shipped to a disposal facility where it will be disposed of according to EPA standards. The reason for this is that, in addition to the dust-bunnies, computers contain some pretty nasty stuff.

According to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), “Electronic computer equipment is a complicated assembly of more than 1,000 materials, many of which are highly toxic, such as chlorinated and brominated substances, toxic gases, toxic metals, photo-active and biologically active materials, acids, plastics and plastic additives.”

Specifically, computer circuit boards contain cadmium and lead. The cathode ray tubes in standard monitors contain barium and lead oxide while their newer flat-panel counterparts contain mercury. In addition, the printed circuit boards as well as cables and plastic covers contain a healthy dose of brominated flame retardants.

America produces 400 million tons of solid waste every year. That’s enough garbage to build more than 1,000 replica’s of the Empire State Building. But we don’t pile our garbage up into unsightly skyscrapers; we stuff it in the ground, into landfills where it is smashed and buried out of sight by bulldozers the size of a house. Besides filling our planet with garbage, the problem when it comes specifically to computer equipment is the process of “leaching”. If you are a coffee drinker, you do a little leaching every morning when you pass water through a coffee filter filled with coffee grounds. The heated clear water passes through the coffee grounds in the filter and the brown stuff drips out into the pot. Think of the earth then as a big coffee filter. Whatever we put into it leaches into the soil and the ground water. Unfortunately, the old saying, “garbage in, garbage out” holds true when it comes to the earth too. In short, what we throw away becomes what we eat and drink.

When it comes to computers, we’ve thrown away a lot already. There is an estimated 3.2 million tons of computer equipment in landfills today. By 2004 there will be more than 300 million obsolete computers and according to a recent study by Carnegie Melon University, we’ll have pitched a minimum of 150 million of those into landfills by 2005. These already staggering numbers will likely only increase as the time to obsolescence decreases.

According to the SVTC, “The average computer platform now has a life-span of about two years, and hardware and software companies constantly generate new programs that demand more speed, memory and power. Today, it is usually cheaper and more convenient to buy a new machine to accommodate the newer generations of technology than it is to upgrade the old.”

Like all the old computers down in The Boneyard that long ago were driven out of use by newer, faster and cheaper computers. And while I take some comfort in knowing that we’re doing the right thing by having them disposed of according to EPA standards, I can’t help but wonder that we have yet to realize the truly high cost of cheap technology.