RECYCLING ELECTRONIC WASTE

RECYCLING ELECTRONIC WASTE

Dear Mr. President: It appears that there is no existing government program right now that addresses the problem of collecting and electronic waste. Electronic waste includes not only personal computers, workstations, servers and mobile phones, but all machines and devices that have processors, keyboards, keypads and memory units. The problem is many of these wastes contain toxic materials that are toxic to the environment.

In the private companies, it is very easy to get rid of these wastes because they could auction these off easily. That is not the end of the problem however, because no one knows what they do with the toxic remains after they extract the valuable materials such as metals, such as gold even. Probably, they could end up in the dumpsites or landfills. It could still be a problem if the toxic wastes would end up in the landfills, because of leaching.

In the government side however, it would be more difficult to get rid of the electronic wastes, because the properties would have to be declared first as “unserviceable”. That is a vague terminology, because some of these properties are still repairable so to speak. So, the remaining alternative is to auction them off, a process that could take a long time. The more logical choice, however, is to donate these to the Local Government Units (LGUs) that may have the budgets to repair them.

Among the LGUs, it is obvious that the first class and second class LGUs could afford to buy their own computers, but it is a big challenge for the third class, fourth class and fifth class LGUs to do that. In general, however, most of these lower class LGUs would have the budgets to repair the “unserviceable” computers. If not, they could probably get donors to raise the money to pay for the repairs.

Another idea is to donate these “unserviceable” computers to TESDA, so that the vocational schools could use them for actual computer repair. There is no better alternative to learning computer repair through actual hands-on exercises. I have seen that happen in my entire career, from the time I was the ICT manager of DFA, to the time that I was the ICT manager of PCSO. Personally, I find much enjoyment in bringing back dead computers to life.

If not TESDA, I know of some NGOs that are very good at repairing “unserviceable” computers. I could vouch for these NGOs, because I have already tried their repair services. As a matter of fact, they not only repair these “broken” units, but they could also upgrade them, so that they could become faster and better. In theory, most of these “broken” units could be repaired. The only concern is that as a rule, the costs of repair should not be more than half the value of new units.

Mr. President, there are only two choices when it comes to LGU computerization. Either they are given money to procure new units, or they are given money to repair the old units. Without working usable computer units, they could not computerize. Without computerization, they could not move forward to digitalization. If you would want it Sir, we could try this out with a few “unserviceable” units from any National Government Agency (NGA), so that we could enable a lower-class LGU to computerize and digitalize. IKE SENERES/09-25-2024

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