When is cheap, cheap enough? The case of the $100 personal computer for kids across the world is shaping up to be a great study in exactly what is wrong the current consumer electronics and personal computer economy. Hint: It’s not really green.

For roughly 250 years, the power of machines to produce goods has grown by unimaginable leaps and bounds. Chemistry and materials science combined with ingenious invention has made the impossible, possible. No one from 300 years ago would recognize most of the ordinary items of today.

At the same time, the western world has changed in governance and market practices. After staggering world events over the last 100 years in war, inflation and politics, the western world has settled into a growth pattern never seen before in the history of the humanity.

Yet, something is terribly wrong. While indicators of wealth are up, up, up! we have set records in environmental degradation and, yes, species extinction. Why? Because our world is increasingly damaged by the success we have created. There are unintended or unimagined consequences to our material and industrial growth. All around us, the natural world is paved, pulverized and polluted in the name of economic growth. In economics, the measures of success do not take into account damage, and do not value fundemental acts of life in the formulas used to make financial decisions, and steer our enormous system forward.

Which brings us to the $100 PC, One Laptop per Child, being promoted by Mr. Nicholas Negroponte, Director of the MIT Media Lab. A star in the early days of the Media Lab, Mr. Negroponte has floundered over the last decade or more while the capacities of ordinary desktop PCs have brought to life the vivd dreams and pronouncements of Media Lab researchers of years ago. Fame is part of success, and the $100 PC is a new attempt at making a famous mark on the history of computing. Without an e-waste program in place, however, it may be a terribly great addition to the progress of industrial technology in polluting the entire world with its heavy metal laden products.

How can the industrialzed west spread complex, resource heavy products into every remote reach of the world, with no responsibility for their end of life care? The people receiving them have no capacity to deal with them, by definition. Where will they end up? Spread into ever more distributed spots of toxics in the water and earth. Or burned or crushed, releasing particulate matter into the air? These machine have a short life span by any measure. We can build more and more of them cheaply, as proven by the explosion of consumer electronics around us. But at what true cost in energy, transportation, toxics?

This leap into the history of computing is driven over and over and over in the news by the $100 figure. Yet, it is expensive to clean up. There is no budget for cleaning up. This is a system gone mad - irresponsible and ill boding. It absolutely must not go forward without the green part, the industrial life cycle, worked out. Otherwise, we do more harm than good.

e-waste, electronics recycling

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Systems, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.