Green issues need blue-skies thinking

Recently I was at a conference on the state of London. Mayor Ken Livingstone 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”.

It looks as if the government’s Waste Strategy will include a similar call for a slop bucket in every home.

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

The European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (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. The burdens also extend, rather confusingly, to resellers and distributors engaged in importing or exporting goods. Already bodies representing smaller IT firms are in dispute with the DTI about where and at what cost they can dispose of their waste.

In March, IT producers had to sign up to one of 37 officially-approved Producer Compliance Schemes; the one run by DHL boasts expertise not just in recycling, but also in data management, procurement, transport management and solution design and “regulatory liaison”. In April, David Miliband’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) published the results of trials in which workers sorted, by hand, 125 tonnes and 16,401 small mixed WEEE items. Defra’s purpose? To “simplify” the WEEE data required of producers.

For me the hand sorting of metals, plastics, PCBs and other components isn’t much of a way forward in 2007. It doesn’t compare with real killer applications in IT, such as robotics, video conferencing, sensors, machine translation, or the recognition of faces and voices.

The management of e-waste is a cost we pay for our leaps in hardware capabilities and convenience. It deserves plenty of innovation – not least around our old friend, the machine recognition of objects. But it 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 his speech, Livingstone said that firms in London that switched off their electricity overnight would cut their carbon emissions by five percent “at a stroke”. On top of IT’s physical components, then, it can’t be long before all hardware-related emissions are tracked. Now why can’t I get really enthralled by that?