A visit to any supermarket in the UK will demonstrate how consumers here are reaping the rewards of globalisation. Not only can you pick up the proverbial “electric kettle for under a fiver” (5 UKP) - manufactured in China, but you will probably also be served at the checkout by low cost labour - a young migrant from Eastern Europe. This flood of low cost goods and labour into western economies is keeping inflation down, and contributing to the economic well being of those of us fortunate enough to be on the receiving end.

I hadn’t appreciated how globalisation works even more effectively in the opposite direction, until I happened to pick up a copy of Québec Science magazine while killing time at Montreal airport. An article by Noémi Mercier (abstract only on-line) describes a visit to Loni Border, between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh in India - “the world’s dumping ground for electronic rubbish” where “men, women, and children are poisoned by dismantling our old computers with their bare hands, burning them in the open air, and treating them in acid baths.”

Of course, the 1992 Basel Convention has “officially” banned rich countries from dumping toxic waste on poor countries. However, such is the power of globalisation, that the presence of desperately poor minority communities in India acts as a giant magnet, attracting containers full of computer equipment from all corners of the globe. Legislation has made little impact, and according to Mercier, the only three state-approved recyclers have spare capacity.

Meanwhile, the illegal industry is booming. Whole neighbourhoods have become specialised in stripping and burning old cables, or stripping circuit boards - men, women, and children from minority communities whose health is being destroyed for 70 rupees or less a day, and whose environment is being polluted for decades with a toxic brew of some of the most unpleasant chemicals on the planet.

The real tragedy is that the vast majority of this trade could be eliminated overnight at source. There is no reason why computer equipment could not have a useful life of a decade or more. However, software and hardware vendors spend billions persuading consumers that they must upgrade. Maybe IT professionals should be taken on tours of these killing fields in India before they succumb to pressure from Microsoft, and take that fatal decision that it’s time to roll out MS-Windows Vista and ‘refresh their hardware estate’.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, just remember that the least environmentally destructive PC is the one you already own…

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Greenery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.