There is no disputing it, electronic waste is a massive problem. Every year hundreds of millions of electronic devices are replaced. But as electronics contain toxic chemicals and heavy metals like lead, they are extremely difficult and costly to dispose of.

Disposing of E-waste using Land fills or incineration simply results in the release of the toxics, which get into ground water and the atmosphere. Recycling is not the solution either, the toxic chemicals mean that recycling electronic waste is an extremely expensive and hazardous operation.

A lot of e-waste “recycling” companies are actually just resellers. They take the waste and sell it to 3rd world countries with lower wages and standards for worker protection. Where people get payed pitiful amounts to deal with the waste, getting poisoned in the proses.

The ironic thing here is that most of this “waste” is actually still perfectly usable. The only reason why it is even considered waste is marketers manipulating people into thinking they need the latest X, when in actuality there old one works perfectly fine.

The desktop computing industry is a prime example of this: People buy a computer, use it for a year or two. By this time computer hardware has evolved substantially and there original computer is starting to feel slow, so they upgrade.

For the vast majority of the population, computers are only used for browsing the internet and basic word processing, neither of these require much processing power at all. Modern computers are actually over powered to the point where they run idle 99% of the time. So where is the slowness coming from?

Its a fundamental software architecture problem with the way that Microsoft Windows is designed. The OS uses a large centralised database, otherwise known as the registry to store program settings. Program uninstallers never clean the registry properly, meaning that it gradually fills up with useless junk, causing the system to slow down.

Solving this problem is trivial: periodically re-install the OS. Unfortunately this solution is not known to most people, who assume the system is broken, thus they replace it.

So whats the solution to E-waste? Don’t upgrade systems for the sake of it.