Why Does Apple Hate The Enviroment 1096

Is there any solid evidence or reason to believe that recycling computers is a good thing?

There's an interesting show on Showtime, "Penn & Teller's 'Bullpoo!'", where they basically debunk dumb things people believe. You'd probably like it, as several episodes have torn to shreds thing I think you'd enjoy seeing torn to shreds: animal rights, endangered species, environmental hysteria. (On the other hand, the episodes on family values and on the boy scouts tore apart positions you've taken here, so you probably wouldn't always like it...).

Anyway, they did an episode on recycling. It was quite interesting. For many things that are commonly recycled, there's no sane environmental reason to do so. Take paper, for example. If you look at the total cost of recycling paper, it is horrible environmentally. The chemicals used to process it for recycling are much worse than the chemicals used when producing new paper, and the pollution is much higher, and I think the energy cost was much higher, too. It's much better both economically and environmentally to ship waste paper off to a land fill, and plant trees to produce new paper. (At projected growth rates, we've got enough space in the US for land fills to last hundreds of years, so no bullpoo about how we only have a few years of land fill space left, BTW).

The situation with plastics is similar.

Basically, of the commonly recycled things, the only one that actually is *good* environmentally is aluminum cans. (It's not a coincidence that you see people out actually collecting cans to recycle them, and you don't see people out picking up waste paper to recycle. Because cans actually make sense to recycle, people will pay enough for them to make collecting them worth while. Compare to, say, paper, where you have to try to coerce people to get them to recycle it. If it actually was good to recycle paper, it would pay enough that people would want to do it, like they do with aluminum cans).

Anyway, thinking about what kind of processing would be involved to recover the materials from a computer to make them usable again, I suspect computer recycling is in the bullpoo category.

-- --Tim Smith