It's been a good while since I've focused my energies on e-waste issues. It's certainly not a topic that comes up over happy hour, and I've been quite busy lately starting a new job in consulting. Yet this same distraction is what got me back onto the subject. You see, I recently acquired a new laptop for work as well as a mandatory smartphone that keeps me tethered to my email and calendar for the new job. I now cart around two phones. It's a bit silly, I admit, but I like to think of the double-phone phenomenon as the physical manifestation of me keeping my work and personal lives separate.
More importantly, when you multiply my situation times the majority of employees who also carry two phones (not to mention ipods and the rest), it adds up to a lot of digital detritus. The sheer quantity of technology used by my firm (and nearly every business today) leads me to wonder where all the old computers go when employees leave. I believe I received a brand-new laptop upon joining my firm. That means there are a ton of old laptops accumulating somewhere, left by employees usually swapping out one Big Four logo for another. The first thought that came to my dorky brain was, “wow. That's a lot of e-waste.”
Which brings me to today. A lot has happened since my last update, and I'm only just beginning to get caught up. In my lapse, there was an article in the Washington Post at the end of October about e-waste in the wake of the new iPhone 4S release. The generic, brush-over-the-issues style is good for spreading general awareness of an otherwise unknown topic, and the iphone connection might have led more people to read it. However, like many pieces in major publications, it fails to provide readers with a deeper understanding of the complex issues and stakeholders involved.
Bigger news is that the Interagency Task Force on Electronics Stewardship, created by Obama in 2010, released its National Strategy for Electronics Stewardship in July 2011 as well as a detailed list of benchmarks and goals for the coming years. The blog over at Electronics Takeback Coalition has a strong opinion on various portions of the report. I've not yet been able to dive into the 30+ page document at length to form my own opinion, but I'm looking forward to it. That said, it doesn't exactly read like a Dan Brown novel, so I will likely take my time reading, reflecting, and collecting my thoughts.
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