High-tech scrap recycled for worthy causes

Computer recycling centre takes many of the PCs discarded in the Bay Area, repairs them and sends them to the developing world

The Alameda County Computer Resource Centre doesn't look like much from the outside. A grimy warehouse hidden away in a corner of Oakland, California, it blends into the poor black neighbourhood that surrounds it: featureless, run-down, ignored. It sits between the respectability of Berkeley to the north, and the most deprived areas of Oakland to the south. Windows here are barred, but not broken. It's a subsistence suburb.

But even at midnight in this gray storage depot, there's activity. In one corner of the centre, a home-made supercomputer grinds through graphics calculations. In another sits a low-power radio station. They're both hobbies of the centre's crew of hardcore geeks and local unemployed on job experience.

The supercomputer is a Frankenstein creation of 64 old, discarded PCs. But then a lot of the centre is made from old, discarded PCs, including some of the furniture. A group of eager activists are piling up slightly more modern discarded machines to ship to civil rights groups in Ecuador. They're dumping them into a shipping container - they reckon they may have room for a hundred or so.

The resource centre has megahertz to spare. Behind the workers, you can see the glimmer of the endless treasures of the Alameda centre: hundreds of square feet of donated computers, televisions, and VCRs. Macintoshes, VAX microcomputers, and an old IBM mainframe. Pallet after pallet of pure Silicon Valley history. All lovingly repaired and refurbished by the team. And all, outside this warehouse, viewed as worthless.

It's the other side of the relentless progress of Silicon Valley. Thanks to the continuous, exponential explosion in processing power driven by companies here, computers just 18 months old are viewed as obsolete - with little or no resale value. Three-quarters of a million PCs and TVs are discarded during upgrades every year in the Bay Area; and close on 1.2 million PCs gather dust in the corners of homes, awaiting the inevitable spring clean.

It's an unnecessary obsolescence, claim the folk at the centre. "Many of these computers are perfectly usable," says Alan Bonetti, operations manager for the centre. "It's just the endless drive for the latest software that makes people throw them out."

Companies across the Bay Area pay to get this equipment taken off their hands. The volunteers sort the PCs and components. The oldest, or broken PCs, get stripped down and sold as scrap. Salvaged PCs get their hard drives wiped, and the Linux operating system installed. Linux is designed to work as well with old machines as new - most are powerful enough to run office software under the free OS.

The refurbished machines are shipped to the first worthy cause to ask. Mostly it's local schools, who get them in batches of 25. Occasionally groups in the developing world get a shipment, like the late-night Ecuador project. One time, it was the Russian Space agency, who used the PCs to help shore up their Mir space-station for a few more months. From one person donating PCs to local schools in 1994, the centre now has four warehouses, each turning over vast inventories of discarded miscellanea every week. Over three thousands PCs are donated every year, and thousands more are safely recycled.

It's a perfect solution on all sides. The geeks get more machines than they know how to play with. Volunteer groups get working information technology. And Silicon Valley gets to off-load its garbage - which is getting increasingly hard for it to do.

Computer technology makes notoriously bad landfill. They call it e-waste here, and Silicon Valley, which has suffered enough toxic damage creating these machines in the first place, knows well enough not to dump them back into the local environment.

Nowadays, it's only expert groups like the resource centre that can deal with e-waste safely. Of course, safety is a relative value - and there are other, less scrupulous groups who can make the problem go away.

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition estimates that more than half the recycled e-waste in the area is currently being shipped off to China, India and Pakistan, where components containing acids, lead, mercury and other dangerous compounds are dismantled by hand and dumped untreated into the local environment.

But the toxics coalition's negative press coverage - including carefully retrieved monochrome photographs of third world despair in the dump sites, with top PC brand logos embarrassingly prominent among the scrap - has focused local business and government attention wonderfully in recent months.

The Californian legislature last week voted in new rules forcing retailers to claw back the cost of recycling for TVs and monitors wherever they are sold new. And monitors are just the beginning.

Benetti predicts that other electronics will be included in the landfill bans in California within the next few years.

It's only a matter of time before what happens in Silicon Valley spreads to the rest of the world: the bans on dumping, the explosion in used computers, and the desperate need to recycle the technology wisely.

"I don't think we can prescribe what others should do with their electronic waste," Benetti says, "but I do think that Silicon Valley should lead by example."

The Alameda centre stands as a textbook, if somewhat offbeat, example of how to handle the oncoming challenge. It's certainly been successful on its own terms. And how many other recycling depots build supercomputers with their scraps?