largely driven by the manufacturers and we have a vicious circle of software vendors bringing out new packages or updates on a regular two to three year basis, these tend to push the hardware to its limits and as a result new software is closely followed by hardware manufacturers bringing out newer faster, more powerful equipment with additional processing, memory, hard drive and storage capacity, which in turn is seen as a spur to software development to use the additional processor, memory, hard drive and storage capacity, and so on and on and on.
We cannot blame the manufacturers for this, after all, innovation is the name of the game in the IT industry and the first company to market usually gets a nice piece of the pie, but eventually the others catch up and do it cheaper.
But, is this sustainable? one would think not.
One must remember that the manufacture of PC's is not really environmentally friendly, a single pc can use up to 240 litres of water during the manufacturing process, not to mention the toxic componments and waste generated. The processor is the greatest cost component in a PC and it is unrecyclable, there is nothing in a processor that can be used again, so when corporates dispose of a PC, the value of it falls to about £75, which is normally the cost of disposal. not great value for money then?
So, what are the alternatives to disposal for a corporate PC? well some donate to charities for use elsewhere in the world or offer them to staff.
I think we are missing a trick here and believe that the best use of old pc's is to reuse the pc in a low capacity function. I'll be posting more on this in the future.
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