Will an e-waste crisis be made in China?

In the world of IT, both energy use and e-waste look set to gain an Eastern aspect.

It’s 2012. The Kyoto Protocol on climate change is history. Instead, America and China squabble over who is most responsible for the world’s growing quantities of greenhouse gas emissions and e-waste.

Do not be alarmed. In 2007, diplomacy still remains the preferred way of conducting international affairs: China, after all, has partly welcomed George Bush’s recent proposal to discuss greenhouse gas emissions outside the UN framework.

But for IT professionals, both energy use and e-waste will, in 2012, have a more Asian dimension than they do today.

The facts are simple. Much of the world’s IT hardware is built in China. Even the emissions bound up in shipping it to the West are likely to come under the microscope as the IT sector adjusts to the idea of “PC miles”.

Second, it will be argued that British IT users should set an example, in their energy habits, to China’s squillions of potential buyers of carbon-emitting cars, flights, mobile phones, PCs and TVs. The mantra will go: “How can we expect the Chinese masses to curb their desires if we don’t first reform our own behaviours?”

Third, listen to activists and academics Ted Smith, David A Sonnenfeld and David Naguib Pellow. Their book, Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry, insists that, while e-waste is typically traded or dumped from North to South, “as nations like India and China modernise, their own industries and consumers are contributing to the problems as well”.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics will be an IT-intensive business. Once they’re over, the West will want to indict Asia’s contribution to e-waste as much as its contribution to global warming. For proof, read Giles Slade’s flawed but fascinating Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America.

Slade believes that, sometime after the Gillette razor blade for men (1905) and Kimberly-Clark’s Kotex sanitary towel for women (1920), Americans began to generalise their throwaway habit to other goods. Put that trend together with Moore’s Law, which brings about rapid obsolescence in IT, and you have unmanageable mounds of e-waste threatening to flood the world with indestructible toxins.

In 2002, Slade reports, America retired 130 million working mobile phones. Shortly, we can expect China to retire even more. But will the Chinese really do what the West tells them and make sure their widgets are always energy-efficient, never shipped abroad, and always designed, as Slade recommends, for disassembly and re-use?

Somehow I doubt Beijing will sign up to all that.