the Onda

The New York times has a great piece this morning on the 1 billion cellphones that are sold in the world every year and where they go to die. The problem of e-waste is something that the big tech companies seem to have woken up to across all sorts of devices, but the author, Jon Mooallem, argues that cellphones are the most pressing problem given the sheer number that are shipped every year, and how quickly both technology and fashion turn over the installed base.
I recently unpacked a box of old cellphones that contained the 5 old phones that I've had from 2003-2007 and currently do not use at all. My first thought was to try to figure out a way to use some of the components in these old phones for some of the physical computing projects that I want to take on in 2008 (after all, a bluetooth serial radio chip costs $60 and each of these phones has this functionality buried somewhere inside it). However, when I couldn't find anything online about how to repurpose them in such a manner (why is this so easy for all of the terrorists on 24 to do so but nearly impossible for the rest of us?), I then briefly considered eBay before realizing that with the exception of the 6 month-old Nokia, it probably wouldn't be worth the hassle. My next thought was this big bin they have in our office's cafeteria that claims to recycle the phones, but having recently read Bruce Sterling's provocative book "Shaping Things," I decided I had to know a little bit more about what would happen to the phones after I deposited them in the bin.

This is where the NYTimes piece shines— it does quite a bit of good reporting on how there are a number of for-profit ventures mining the phones in an environmentally conscious way for precious metals, or reconditioning them for secondary markets. Without giving too much away, I love the idea that by melting down phones, this Belgian company called Umicore gets to manufacture $24K bars of solid gold.

Governments are very good at providing structure that keeps companies from doing the really bad things, but in my mind, it is private efforts like these— motivated by profit— that are ultimately going to help us out of this environmental morass we are sinking ourselves into.

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