computer/electronic waste

[fishy101]

I am doing a research project on computer waste for school and I figure I might want to know how big of an issue this is in the IT world out there. So has anyone encounter issues with computer waste at their work place? Or do you know of any computer/electronic waste issues that you have heard about?

I have done some reading about this, and I have some sense of what the general statistics is like. I mainly want to hear about personal experiences in work places. But constructive comments are always welcome. Thanks in advance.

 

[toph99]

what exactly do you mean by 'computer waste'?

 

[AMDJunkie]

Yeah, there's about 6 cubic feet of it in the office. It's called an "Intel 486".

 

[fishy101]

sorry the lack of a definition. But what I meant by computer waste is just basically any computer parts that your company are not planning to use, and what I am interested in is what they do with it. If you have stats about your particular company, that would be cool too. Oh, since TVs are pretty much the same as monitors, they count too, although I don't expect that to be as big a problem.

 

[Phalkon]

I worked for the Armed Forces in Toronto Ontario in their Telecommunications section.
For the amount of stuff that they administer, they don't have very much waste.
I can estimate how much stuff they had for you:

about 5 30" RJ45 cables, and about 20 10" cables
~30 IDE HD and FDD Controller cards
a few SCSI controller cards (5 or 6)
~25 486 CPU's
~7 Pentium CPU's
~50 IDE Controller cables

the rest was broken

Some of the stuff will be useful for replacement parts, the rest of the obsolete stuff will be taken home by employees, auctioned, or trashed.

 

[DaveJ]

Right now we probably have between 30 and 50 machines stacked up at work, ranging from a P75 to a P166... they typically get reformatted and loaded with a basic image, then donated to various organizations. There are plenty of other areas that we "waste" resources, like ordering parts that don't get used, and other such stuff...

Dave

 

[6TNINE]

where i work, we have about 10 486's just sitting in a closet that are just way to slow to process the kind of data that we do, it's crazy, they've just been sitting there for over a year!!

 

[fishy101]

For those people who said their companies has dead computer parts, does your company have plans on how to get rid of them? If not, why not(not worth the effor/money, too hard to find takers or others)?

 

[KidViciou$]

whoops, wrong thread

 

[vi edit]

I try to recycle as much stuff as I can. I can turn a bare-bone 486 into a linux firewall. In a small office environment with semi-computer illiterate people, a P-166 running word/excel/email is just dandy, so there really aren't many complaints there either.

On some old parts that I can't find a use for, I try to sell on the fs/t boards and work really doesn't mind if I pocket the $$ for it.

There's somethings I just don't know what to do with though...like this bitch of an old novel server. I really can't do a whole lot with it, but it has just enough purpose not to throw away. For now it's just being used as a 65 pound footrest until I figure out what that purpose is.

 

[MWink]

I'm not a company but I have 20 computers/cases, 30 dot matrix printers, and 25 working monitors scattered in the basement. I have no idea what to do with them. I am waiting for them to become collectors items, and then I will become rich.

 

[fishy101]

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