For less than £20 you don't have to worry about what to do with that dilapidated machine. Your conscience can be clear and you can dispose of your old PC in an environmentally friendly way. Electronic Recycling, based in Finglas, will dispose of your old desktop for a mere £10.
Most of the computers that arrive at the company cannot be reused because they are so old, according to David Rothwell, operations director at the company.
With sales of computers in Ireland almost tripling to around 325,000 a year in 1999, from over 100,000 in 1996, the problem of disposing of old machines is set to grow. Rothwell says in most cases 98 per cent of a computer can be recycled. If there are parts that can be reconditioned and re-used, the company sells them on, but the majority of the computers are broken into their constituent parts and either shredded or melted down and recycled.
PC Cards and motherboards are shipped off to Belgium to be smelted down for precious metals such as Palladium. Plastic or metal frames are melted down and sold on for reuse. A Life project, funded by the EU and involving three of Dublin's local authorities, Fingal Recycling and local organisations, is beginning in the New Year. The initiative will see companies and multinationals' old computers being reconditioned, with new hard drives installed and given to disadvantaged families as part of an effort to bridge the digital divide.
The project will also offer the public depots throughout the Dublin area to drop off their old PCs, and the confidentiality of previous material on the computer is guaranteed, as all hard drives will be destroyed. Then the computers will be recycled or reused for a nominal fee.
A new EU directive on Waste Electronic and Electrical goods (WEE) will make it incumbent on manufacturers and distributors of electrical and electronic equipment to take back their products from consumers once they are no longer useful and recycle them at their own cost. Ireland has managed to get a stay on the implementation of the directive because of the woeful lack of a recycling infrastructure here.
Legislation on recycling in Ireland seems non-existent, and in many counties companies are allowed to dump old computers into landfills that are already overloaded. However, this may become part of the solution as the cost of land filling is becoming more expensive than recycling, making it economically sensible for companies to recycle.
John Gormley TD, of the Green Party, says many people are simply not aware of the risks posed to the environment by computers, and just dump them in a skip. The recycling of the metals in computers is far more energy efficient than mining new resources.
Recycling copper, for example, uses six times less energy than mining, and for aluminium the amount of energy used is more than 20 times less.
Apart from the problem of disposing of computers, it seems that computers themselves have failed to deliver one of the main things they promised - a paperless office.
As most people who work in a fully computerised office will have noticed, the piles of paper building up on their desks have certainly not disappeared, and have increased in some cases.
"I have no doubt that computers are generating more paper because people now have laser printers and speed photocopiers which makes creating multiple copies of something easy," Gormley says.
"The problem is people like to use paper - it is convenient and manageable and until we find an electronic substitute that people like to use this will not change."