Conformity Magazine

Of the world’s nearly two billion children, most are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. That’s because, for children living in many developing countries around the world, education is a luxury that they can only dream of, that is, when they’re not overwhelmed by the abject poverty in which they live, or worried about where they might find their next meal.

This horrific reality is behind the mission of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, championed by Nicholas Negroponte and other veterans of the famed Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The goal of OLPC is to ensure that children everywhere have access to the modern technology that we take for granted here in the United States.

OLPC began mass production of its distinctive XO laptop last November, and has established a donor program that will build and ship to a developing country one laptop for each $200 contribution, a bargain by any measure when you consider the life-changing potential benefit to the recipient of that computer.

It’s ironic then, that a country that can create such a demonstrably compassionate initiative like the OLPC is also one of only three countries in the world that has failed to ratify the global ban on shipments of hazardous waste (including hazardous electronic waste) to poor countries under the 1989 Basel Convention and the so-called Basel Ban amendment passed in 1995 (the other two countries are Haiti and Afghanistan).

Although eight U.S. states have implemented mandatory end-of-life take-back programs for manufacturers of consumer electronics, our national strategy is based (so far, at least) on the voluntary cooperation of industry. Unfortunately, according to a recent report in National Geographic Magazine, the result of our “hands-off” regulatory approach seems to be that the greater part of electronic waste created here winds up being shipped overseas to what are often environmentally unsound “reclamation” shops in poor countries like Ghana, India and Pakistan, and even China.

Once our electronic waste has been conveniently shipped offshore, impoverished workers, including children as young as 10 or 11 years of age, are paid literally pennies a day to harvest toxic metals from discarded printed circuit boards and other computer components. The dangerous harvesting processes run the gamut, from burning computer wires to expose valuable copper (and simultaneously releasing toxic fumes from the burned plastic coatings), to melting circuit boards in cooking pots and pans to extract lead and other metals, and then using those very pots and pans to cook a meager meal.

And sadly, that’s about as close as many children in these countries will ever get to a computer.

The United States has always been one of the most compassionate and generous countries in the world. A country in which people can work toward a day when every child has a computer can certainly find a way to ensure that that same child doesn’t risk their health recycling ours.

Bill von Achen, Managing Editor
bvonachen@conformity.com

p.s. Our readers can read the National Geographic article on the global e-waste problem at this link. For those who would like to learn more about the One Laptop Per Child initiative, please visit www.laptopfoundation.org.