As a child I remember falling in love with the term “Jack of all trades”. I found it highly intriguing that someone could have a broad skillset and be capable of doing so many things. As I grew older I found that some of my childhood heroes were people like Indiana Jones- an educated man who chose to explore the past and find adventure, or James Bond- a man who had the skills and the gadgetry to get himself out of the most dire situations.
In the past five years I earned a similiar reputation. I’m definately not Indiana Jones- I haven’t swung from a tree for several years. I’m not James Bond- I haven’t rescued any damsels in distress lately either. But I don’t really think of those characters as being a “Jack of all trades”- I think of them as critically thinking about the situations they are most likely to find themselves in, creatively thinking about the tools they have and the challenges they currently face, and the idealogy that no matter how bad the situation is they must take action to change it.
The Lifespan of Technology
Have you ever wondered what you can really do with a 3.5 Ghz Pentium, a gb of ram, 200 gb hard drive, a DVD burner, and a graphics card that will render 5,000,000 polygons? You could play intensive video games or launch a half dozen shuttles into space. Imagine this- the Apollo mission computer had roughly 74 kilobytes of memory (mostly hard-wired) and only 4 kb or so of RAM.
If you do the math, we have transcended the computational power a thousand times over and for the most part the typical computer user only surfs the net or plays an occasional video game. As part of this uncanny usage- things become obsolete quickly as we strive to “bigger and better”
In an e-waste report for Seattle Public Utilities (full report available here) – several staggering items were noted just from a small regional scale.
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1- Seattle residents will generate an estimated 251,000 computers, computer monitors, and televisions in 2003, a quantity of material that weighs approximately 4,800 tons. The number of items generated is expected to increase about 9% by 2010.
2- Northwest Washington residents will generate an estimated 1,286,000 computers, computer monitors, and televisions in 2003, a quantity of material that weighs approximately 25,000 tons. The number of items generated is expected to increase about 18% by 2010.
3- Seattle residents are already storing an estimated 223,000 obsolete computers, computer monitors, and televisions, and Northwest Washington residents are storing an estimated 1,220,000 of these items. These items are estimated to weigh 3,530 tons and 19,200 tons, respectively. These materials are not included in the above generation or cost estimates because it is uncertain when they would come out of storage.
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The report also said that the average “life” of a computer was gauged at four years. I find this number to be a highlight of the fact that as a society we are throwing away perfectly good tools that could be used in a variety of fashions. Not everyone has the budget or the need to have the “latest and greatest” computer. There may be a time when a computer is truly useless- but rather than waste $300k to $400k plus the additional cost paid to a recycling vendor, why would we not choose to provide these units to educators, students, low-income or elderly citizens who do not have the ability to have *any* computer? Magnified onto a national or global scale- we are simply wasting millions of dollars in “recycling” materials that could be a benefit to someone else.
Recognizing that something is of no use to you anymore does not equal that it is of no use to anyone.