Opinion: Toxic schlock syndrome

While that's good news for resellers, presuming they got a slice of most of the action, apart from vendor-direct sales, it's not such good news for the planet, with Gartner analysts estimating that around 35,000,000 retired PCs are headed for landfill - and that's just this year.

With the installed base predicted to grow at 12 percent annually, we can confidently expect the same growth in the number of discarded computers ending up in landfill.

Of course this is all predicated on achieving a massive reduction in CO2 emissions, otherwise at the predicted rate of global warming there won't be all that much land left to fill. No matter what happens to the climate, we really can't just keep on chucking stuff we don't want into the nearest hole.

Now you'd have to think that the world's PC users are among the better informed and better educated of the global citizenry. Surely all these PCs aren't being used to manage the stock portfolios of illiterate fringe-dwellers, but hey, I've been wrong before.

So, if the billion-plus PCs (quite a few more got sold since I started typing) are in the hands of people with more than a clue about what's happening to the planet they inhabit, surely what happens to end-of-life PCs is firmly under our well-informed and educated control.

We've already discovered that our own politicians (and those of almost every other country you can name) aren't going to do anything for the planet for fear of losing even one vote. We will probably all have to pitch in and build several community arks before our politicians overcome their inability to act.

So, make sure the PC that leaves your desk when a new one arrives is not going into a hole in the ground. Insist it gets re-used or recycled.