Don’t let the e-waste tail wag the innovation dog

Killer applications, not regulatory labyrinths about waste, are the way forward in IT

Just recently I was at a conference on the state of London. Ken Livingstone, the city’s mayor, made the opening address. One of his chief slogans concerned human waste:  ‘If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down’. Now the government’s Waste Strategy seems to want a slop bucket in every home.

Current affairs turn more and more on waste. What New Labour likes to term the ‘behaviours’ of consumers with waste are now the subject of state policy. My worry is that people in IT could also find themselves conforming to excessive government interference around waste.

The European Union’s WEEE directive, which passed into UK law on 2 January, insists that hardware producers have in place by 1 July protocols for how they will recycle their kit. However the burdens on producers also extend, rather confusingly, to a number of resellers and distributors engaged in importing or exporting goods. (1) Already bodies representing SMEs in IT are in dispute with the DTI about where and at what cost they can put their waste. (2)

In March, IT producers had to sign up to one of 37 officially-approved Producer Compliance Schemes; the one run by DHL, no less, boasts expertise not just in recycling, but also in data management, procurement, ‘transport management and solution design’ and ‘regulatory liaison’ (3) Then, in April, David Miliband’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published the results of trials in which workers sorted, by hand, 125 tonnes and 16,401 individual items of small mixed WEEE. DEFRA’s purpose? To ‘simplify’ the WEEE data required of producers – over 100 pages of text. (4)

For me the hand sorting of metals, plastics, PCBs and other components in IT hardware isn’t much of a way forward for innovation in 2007. Greens will say it is; but it doesn’t much compare with real killer applications in IT – applications such as robotics, videoconferencing, sensors, machine translation, or the recognition, processing and display of faces and voices.

The management of e-waste is merely a cost we pay for our leaps in hardware capabilities and convenience. As an activity, it deserves plenty of innovation – not least around our old friend, the machine recognition of objects. But the management of e-waste is not worth getting evangelical about. As a vision of the future, it already gives too many people in IT an interpersonal and moral compass that plays, I believe, an all too religious role in these overly uncertain times.

In his speech, Ken Livingstone said that firms in London that switched off their electricity overnight would cut their carbon emissions by five per cent ‘at a stroke’. On top of its physical components, then, it can’t be long before the emissions surrounding every aspect of IT hardware are tracked with all the probity of the City of London.

Now why can’t I get really enthralled by all that?

(1) Laura Hailstone, ‘Finding the way through the WEEE maze’, Channel Reseller News, 12 March 2007, on http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/analysis/2185170/finding-way-weee-maze

(2) Laura Hailstone,‘ITACS campaign challenges WEEE’, Channel Reseller News, 30 April 2007, on  http://www.itweek.co.uk/crn/news/2188857/itacs-campaign-challenges-weee

(3) http://www.dhl.co.uk/publish/gb/en/services/logistics/weee/services.high.html

(4) See DEFRA in association with the CIWM (EB), Chartered Institution of Wastes Management Environmental Body, Trial to establish waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) protocols, April 2007, p11, on http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/waste/topics/electrical/pdf/weee-protocol-report-070412.pdf