Where does all the digital junk go?

Click the picture to view a series of “digital dump” photographs by Foreign Policy.

An interesting quote from that article:

Each year, between 20 and 50 million tons of electronic waste is generated globally. Most of it winds up in the developing world.

Some of the most popular destinations for dumping computer hardware include China, India, and Nigeria. It can be 10 times cheaper for a “recycler” to ship waste to China than to dispose of it properly at home. With the market for e-waste expected to top $11 billion by 2009, it’s lucrative to dump on the developing world.

Scary!

When I heard from one of my colleagues how they discard PCs like junk cars, I couldn’t help but cringe on the humongous wastage! In India we don’t throw away old PCs, we just keep them either hoping to get things done using that or outright refusing to put any more money on that…I am more of the former-category person, but I keep buying new ones at least . I still have my first computer (a Pentium 100, 440Bx, 64MB RAM, 4GB HDD) with me. Throwing it out is a strict no-no (I spent INR 75K for getting that 11yrs back), but I can always give it to someone more needy. I need to put them all in a chassis though, which is something very difficult as I need  to search for all the parts first! See how it all boils down to laziness?!

I may soon have to think of some way to dispose off my old PCs (a P100, a PII, a Celeron 1Ghz & a P4), as already the sound my P4 / C2Duo fans make has attracted the attention of the top mangement. I can probably use my old PC with Linux as a streaming agent in the balcony, but hey I’d be the only one using it. Hmmm…lets see, how about trying to setup a Linux cluster? I have never tried this before, should be fun. Or probably, I can just put them all in a switch and try to learn some serious parallel programming. Any other thoughts?