Fifty years ago, it would have been unheard of to separate a bottle in a separate trash container (unless you were going to get your nickel deposit back).  Today homeowners don’t give it a second thought to segregate paper, plastic, and aluminum for recycling.  It is part of the cultural psyche to consider the environment by saving renewable resources.  But what about the electronic devices that are past their prime and have been replaced?

According to the EPA, in 2007 2.25 million tons of electronic products were manufactured, yet only 414,000 tons of end of life devices were recycled.  This makes electronic devices the fastest growing waste stream on the planet.  Consider that 130,000 PCs were discarded last year, along with over 1 million cell phones.  The challenges go beyond filling up our landfills.

Electronic devices contain plastic, glass, and precious metals that could be recovered if disposed of properly.  Depending on the price of these materials, it becomes quite attractive to recyclers to process discarded electronics.  (Gold is currently over $1,000/ounce!)  Recovering and reusing these materials also reduces the impact on the environment of having to process new material.  There are other reasons to recycle as well.

Many of the components of electronics are hazardous.  Most electronic devices contain mercury, cadmium, and lead.  Dumping such material into landfills creates an environmental issue.  Last, there is a very important byproduct of PCs that must be considered before disposal; it might contain private information and personal data!

What Can Be Done?

Before discarding any electronic devices, be sure that any data on them has been destroyed.  Cell phones need to be wiped and disks from PCs and servers should be formatted using a file delete utility specifically for destroying data.  An associate of mine (and an avid hunter) would use his old disks for target practice.  Nothing says “unrecoverable” like a 30.06 round.

Before discarding old equipment, consider donating old equipment to charitable organizations.  There are several in the area that take and refurbish old equipment.  One such organization is “Nonprofit technical Resources”.  Information about them can be found at www.ntrweb.org .  If the equipment really needs to be disposed of, there are a few options.   Manufacturers often offer to recycle old equipment when purchasing new.  Also, big box stores often provide for taking your old equipment (often even if you are not buying new).  A great resource can be found on the “Earth911” website at http://earth911.com/electronics/proper-disposal-and-recycling-of-e-waste/  .

Chuck Virtu

Long live the king, the king is dead…or is he?
A common question from clients in the process of upgrading PCs is “Isn’t XP dead, shouldn’t we go to Vista?” While XP will soon no longer be available to the consumer, Microsoft Extended Support will continue through August 2014. This means security updates will continue to be available through that date.
While Vista offers some nice user features and may be a fine solution for home use, in the business environment there are several items that should be considered before considering an upgrade:
• Does the current PC’s hardware support Vista?
Vista’s hardware requirements are much greater than those of XP. Upgrading to Vista could cause problems afterwards of poor performance or require adding new components to an old PC.
• Do the applications currently in use support Vista?
Often the applications used in the business environment will need to be upgraded to a current version to be “Vista aware”. Be sure to validate that all critical applications will work.
• Since I’m buying a new PC, shouldn’t I get Vista with it? Then I can upgrade to Windows 7 later.
Since there is no easy path to upgrade from XP to WIN7, clients have asked about getting new PC’s with Vista then upgrading to WIN7 when it is available. This is a valid plan but my experience is that once a PC is in place, clients rarely spend the time and money to do such an upgrade later.
In conclusion, while Vista is still the “shiny bauble” that everyone is staring at, the best business solution is to stay with XP for now. Once released to the general public (and after the first major update), WIN7 will then become the preferred operating system for business.
On both my personal and business laptops I have been running the Beta version of WIN7 since January, and it offers all the good parts of Vista without any of the headaches. It even supports legacy applications that still require XP by running in “XP Mode”.