‘Unstoppable WEEE Tsunami’ staunched by PPP plan

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and several Central American Governments have decided waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is both a threat to and an opportunity for the region. A dictionary’s worth of lengthily-be-acronymed groups convened for the ITU/United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) …

[Fihart]

Two (sorry three, sorry four, five) main villains

Microsoft's ever upward processing power requirements encouraging users to dump otherwise viable computers. Desktop and laptop makers for selling machines with substandard components that fail prematurely (power supply fans, motherboard caps*). Cellphone networks for offering "free" phone upgrades. Phone, camera makers for specifying otherwise identical power cube and batteries that are incompatible between models, let alone between brands.

Small changes, practical in most of the above could save a vast amount of waste (as per EU ruling on phone chargers).

* This is particularly maddening given that forty year old hifi components still work perfectly.

[Pookietoo]

Re: forty year old hifi components still work perfectly

I suspect the hi-fi components aren't running as hot, or for as long, as many PC and network components.

[Irongut]

Re: Two (sorry three, sorry four, five) main villains

The minimum requirements for Vista, 7 and 8 are the same. But don't let the facts get in the way of your anti-MS rant.

[Fihart]

@ Irongut Re: Two (sorry three, sorry four, five) main villains

The requirements for Vista, 7 and 8 may be identical (according to you, anyway) but they are significantly greater than that for XP which so many people still use for that and other reasons ( and for which Microsoft has withdrawn support).

[Alan Brown]

Re: @ Irongut Two (sorry three, sorry four, five) main villains

By the time you load up an Antivirus on XPsp3 and expect to be able to do anything else, you need 2Gb.

A machine equipped with this much ram will run Win7 faster than WinXP - mainly because MS had to optimise things a bit in order to fit it on netbooks. With the demise of netbooks, the bloatpath resumed in Win8.

[keithpeter]

Re: @ Irongut Two (sorry three, sorry four, five) main villains

Win7 goes fine on a thinkpad T60 I set up for a relative, along with the MS security essentials. 1Gb ram and it is chugging away nicely with her Office & web. OK for a 2006 machine.

You can put Lubuntu (or even Antix) on an older machine and get more use out of it, especially if it is just sitting in a library or cafe or community centre running a Web browser. I guess that is down to admin issues & labour cost of installation.

Posted from a workstation PC manufactured in 2005 with (obviously) better than average capacitors in the circuit boards!

[Ross K]

Comedy Gold

WEEE tsunami

a chance [...] to turn WEEE into gold

Who writes this stuff?

But seriously, I applaud any country in the developing world for getting on board the whole WEEE thing.

Given that the USA should be leading by example in that region, it's sad that they appear to be paying lip-service to the idea of recycling toxic electronic waste. It's easier to put all that crap on a ship to China and make it someone else's problem.