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How many computers are obsoleted each year?

Posted in Coding, Freecycle on August 18, 2008 at 11:22 am

I freecycle old computers (making sure they are safe to do so http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/06/20/hard-disk-sanitation-for-recycyling/ ) and I know many others do but the size of the problem of “old” computers is staggering. I came across these figures the other day

Hundreds of millions of PCs are sold to businesses each year … On the other side of the equation, hundreds of millions of PCs are taken out of service every year.… in the United States alone, as many as 500 million computers became obsolete in 2007, according to the National Recycling Coalition.

500,000,000 obsoleted computers last year in the US alone - that is potentially a lot of land fill.

What can we do about it?

As individuals we can recycle kit.
In our companies we can use what influence we have to make sure kit is recycled.
As IT sales people I guess you can’t just stop selling them! Maybe a recycling program can feature in the service though?
As s/w / infrastructure designers we could aim to keep stuff runable on old kit (it won’t make you popular with your h/w sales team if you have one!). Also, unless you support the latest interfaces it makes your product look old.
Perhaps the hardest option is that at home and in the office we can choose not to keep up with the latest kit. On the bright side that means when you do need to upgrade you can either go for cheap recycled (not creating more waste) or super state of the art (not needing updating so often).

Hmm, that’ll be recycled at home and state of the art at work please