cubist said:
There isn't anything in a computer that isn't in a TV, and people have been disposing of TVs for 50 years already without a whisper of this environmentalist baloney.
This is only half true; CRTs are very bad for the environment (lots of lead in the glass), and there's a lot more that goes into making a pile of chips than a big glass tube with an electron gun on the back end. You can say that you don't care one way or the other, or that there's probably a whole lot worse going on in the world, but it's not that simple.
If you really want to know, CRT-based TVs and monitors contain as much as several
pounds of lead bound up in the glass (for radiation shielding). This is why they're so expensive to dispose of, and why nobody will take them.
Saying that they've ben thrown away for years without any ill effects isn't true at all, as a relative of mine who happens to be visiting right now and does toxic waste cleanup for a living will attest to. The stuff that people used to just toss in the back yard or bury behind the factory (white lead behind a paint factory, CRTs in landfills, etc) causes groundwater pollution, birth defects, and all manner of nasty things decades down the road, and they're now very, very expensive to clean up.
That's only CRTs, and although there are other problems with the production of LCDs, that's why they're generally vastly preferable to CRTs even when you don't take the energy savings into account.
Plus, if you look inside your computer, you'll see hundreds of little chips; each of those chips contains some silicon, probably some copper and aluminum, maybe some tin and lead. No big deal, but the factories used to make those chips often use a whole lot of energy and a wide variety of toxic chemicals in the production of these chips, and in many cases they're located in Malaysia and other countries that have very poor environmental laws (not to mention poor labor laws).
Point being that these aren't always benign little chips--a lot goes into making them, and it shouldn't just be ignored. Not saying you should never buy a new computer--I have a brand new G5 myself--but pretending that computers are environmentally perfect or pretending that the lead and other toxics that go into making them aren't really anything to worry about is just unnecessary.
It's heartening to hear when people actually care a bit about the impacts of what they do. Even if it isn't all that bad, or you decide that it's worth the downdsides, it'd be nice if everybody took the effort to find out one way or the other.
low power powermacs!
