The Family Guide to Digital Freedom

Of course it does. The average USA citizen produces 4.6 lbs of solid waste per day, and an ever growing part of it is software. Sure, software is just instructions, the immaterial part of a computer and many other electronic devices. As such, it should not pollute, right? Instead, it does: a lot. Obviously this doesn't happen directly. We pollute a lot by trashing too much working electronic devices of any kind and buying unnecessary others, too often.

In January 2007 the UK Green Party officially declared Vista, the new operating system likely to be installed on many millions of new and used personal computers, a "landfill nightmare". The reasons? The fact that this software may "force expensive and environmentally damaging hardware upgrades". More specifically the fear is that an enormous number of monitors and other perfectly working hardware "will be junked by consumers and companies as Vista will refuse to play the new high-definition DVDs with current monitors and sound cards".

Potential risks for the environment do not come just from the need to control and restrict entertainment or to sell ever more software or computers every other year. The Children Machines described in another chapter are made according to the latest, more environmentally friendly regulations. Those laptops, however, are meant to be sold and used in countries which have no adequate recycling centers and no money or infrastructures to collect used computers. This is already raising serious concerns about the environmental impact of the whole "One Laptop Per Child" project in a few years from now, when those laptops will break or be dismissed from use.

The reason to be concerned about it is that electronic devices contain many toxic substances: so many that in 2004 even a report of the United Nations University of Tokio recommended to extend the lives of computers for this very reason. The report pointed out that, in that year "a 2-gram memory chip required 1.3 kilograms (1,300 grams) of fossil fuels and materials", while a whole computer and a big monitor required "1.8 tons of water, fossil fuels and chemicals to make".

Generally speaking, making hardware or any other high-tech digital object can be a pretty dirty job. In april 2000 the San Francisco Bay Guardian reported that several hi-tech workers were suing their employers because of serious illnesses. Higher rates of miscarriage, some types of cancer and premature death have been observed among the workers of semiconductor and hard disks factories in several countries.

Today all this still happens, just in other countries. Electronics manufacturing workers in Mexico and many other countries have just started to discover that they face the same health and safety hazards experienced 20 years ago in Silicon Valley.

The problem is not limited to the manufacturing of electronic devices: it remains even when it's time to dump or recycle them. Electronic waste or E-waste is the most rapidly growing waste problem in the world.
In 2005 nearly 2 million tons of electronic waste, including 133,000 PCs discarded each day, were produced in the U.S. alone.

This is true even if many computer makers have indeed started to use more environmentally friendly materials and procedures. All around the world there is still a huge quantity of older components which were produced committing what a 2002 report called the Seven Deadly Sins: these include usage of lead (brain and blood damage), flame retardants (hormones imbalance), and PVC cabling which generate dioxins when burned. Even in this case, often the world' richest countries are still simply dropping the problem abroad.
Still in the U.S., only 10 to 15 percent of electronics are currently recycled, but in 80 per cent of those cases up to 80 percent simply means "exported overseas". The situation in most other countries is the same or worse.

The true cost of software upgrades

Replacing even one single software program may mean to be forced to replace a whole, still perfectly working computer, that is to contribute to the problem described above.
It starts innocently: a computer has 512 MB (Megabytes) of memory but the next version of program X requires at least 600 MB just to start up (in a computer, the "memory" is the set of circuits used for temporary storage of data and intermediate, real-time calculations. Permanent data storage happens in separate hard disks which can be internal or external to the computer). But there is no 88 Megabyte memory stick on the marketplace, the minimum size is 256 or 512 MB. Since they cost only a few dollars, OK, no big deal, let's buy 256, right? Yes, but only if the the motherboard of that computer does have a place where one can plug the memory sticks they sell today.

At this point, in order to use "the next version of program X" the owner has already given in to buying more memory than is actually needed, plus a new motherboard to host it. Even if the program itself was illegally copied at no cost. But the new motherboard is, very likely, not compatible with the processor, the heart of the computer, so it is necessary to buy one of them too, please. Will the power supply connector of the new motherboard be directly compatible, without any adapter, with the power supply socket on the motherboard? This is not a big deal, especially because it only matters if the old power supply is powerful enough to handle the current motherboards and processors.

Does it end here? Maybe not: the scanners, printers, external modems and tablets one could buy a few years ago have connectors which are not necessarily present on all the motherboards sold today. If this is the case, it's time to figure out what is less expensive and time consuming between buying extension cards with those connectors or new printers, scanner and so on altogether: either way, more money will be spent.

Note that the "buying extension cards" route is feasible only if the software components (drivers) which control the original printer and other devices are compatible with the new operating system. Yes, because there is no guarantee that the old operating system installed on the internal disk will be compatible with the new amount of memory, the new processor and extension cards and so on.

By this time, all is left of the original computer are mouse, keyboard, CD or DVD players, the disk and the case. Not bad, is it? Especially when considering that there was nothing wrong with all those other pieces, and that they would have continued to work for years, had it not been for those 88 MB of extra memory.

Of course, all this pain would have lasted much less if the "old" computer had been a laptop: they are still manufactured and assembled in so many non-standard ways, using custom components, that unless the laptop can handle more memory as it is, the only solution is to forget upgrades and buy a new one.

So this is the true cost, both on people wallets and on the environment, of that apparently harmless "next version of program X". Repeating the exercise for every computer of every government or business makes very easy to see the landfills being very busy with e-waste for the next few decades.

Again, please note that this true cost doesn't depend at all from the official cost or license of that program. The only things that make the difference are the hardware requirements of software programs and the protocols and formats they use to exchange data. In the first case, it is essential to develop and use software whose environmental impact, er we mean hardware requirements, is as low as possible: office productivity software, for example, could be written to run smoothly on the average computer of three years ago, not only the shiniest model that one can buy in stores this week. Regardless of how one plans to license
or market that software.

The solution: use the right software, protocols and formats

Of course, this doesn't mean at all that society should do without software, or stop the extending the adoption of digital technologies (when such adoption does make sense,of course). It is just necessary to be aware of all the risks and act accordingly.

All citizens and their Public Administrations or Schools can contribute to fight the e-waste crisis in many ways: one of the easiest and most effective ways is to make computers live longer, that is to replace them only when they actually break. This is much easier than it seems. Luckily, any computer is only as old as the software it runs. As long as that software lets you work and, above all, it is possible to communicate with other computer users, there is no reason to replace it.

We have already explained, however, that software can have very unpleasant effects even if you stop using it or others around you use it improperly. Software-induced pollution is bad in the same way, since tolerating it on a few computers may force many others to pollute in the same way. This is especially true with Public Administrations: one single Ministry which begins requiring digital documents that can be only created with the latest version of a specific program may force all its parties to waste perfectly working computers, for the reasons described above. Therefore, besides the cultural and civic reasons we already know about, there are also health and environmental ones to demand that only truly open digital technologies are adopted.

Websites which destroy forests

Speaking of the impact of software on natural resources, one consequence of the huge diffusion of the Internet has been a huge increase in the number of web pages printed and discarded almost immediately, for a lot of different reasons: paper is still more confortable than monitors for one's eyes, information like train or plane schedules must be carried along for reference and so on. In spite of this, many websites do not provide a version of their pages properly formatted for printing. They either publish their text inside unprintable movies or seem to design pages with the explicit purpose of wasting as much paper as possible: sometimes, for each paragraph of text, the printer also spits out three or four pages of advertising, navigation menus and other stuff that one has already seen or, like the menus, is simply useless on paper.

Making available properly printable versions of each page of a website is an easy task for a competent webmaster. Restructuring a very large, already existing website is a different issue, but even in that case it is important to complain and ask for more forest-friendly websites.