Triplesourced

Green may be a vote winner but you wouldn’t know it from the government’s feeble attempts to enact the European tech recycling directive WEEE into UK legislation.
Other states managed to roll out the directive on schedule but the UK is at least a year behind and has dragged its feet all the way thanks to some heavy-weight lobbying from the tech producers. But from the 2 January next year, the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment directive will be law – although typically we still have to wait till July for full compliance to be enforced. So what does it all mean? Well effectively it means that manufacturers will be liable for the entire lifecycle of a piece of kit. A lot of this burden will rest on the manufacturers but obviously they are going to pass on those costs to the consumers. But instead of everyone paying for tech to be recycled, or disposed of, through council taxes etc, the biggest purchasers and manufacturers will have to cover the costs.

Nigeria is so concerned with the problem of e-waste being dumped in the country that the government has set-up a national committee to look into the issue.

One representative interviewed by the BBC claimed that 75 percent of the second-hand PCs entering the country are junk. The problem has been exacerbated by the sheer volume of shipments coming into the country which makes it very difficult to sort the genuine reconditioned machines from the defunct ones. Once in the country, junk machines are being broken down for scrap which includes dangerous practices such as recovering lead in very basic conditions.

IT charity Computer Aid – which takes old PCs from businesses and refurbishes them for the developing world – has launched
a Christmas e-card scheme . The idea is that in return for donating £1.00 or more to the charity, you get to send an electronic card to friends and family without sacrificing anything of an arboreal persuasion.

Morgan Spurlock of Super-size Me fame has a new series in the UK called Thirty Days in which he gets individuals to experience a life in someone else's shoes. Last night was the turn of a computer programmer whose lucrative job was off-shored to India. Spurlock dispatches the developer to Asia to find out whether his prejudices about the company and country that took his job are justified. You can find out more here

Or the Transport for London lost and found department as it’s also known. Our colleagues at Silicon.com have an excellentphoto story on the mountains of BlackBerrys, mobile phones, iPods and laptops that get left on London’s tubes, buses, and taxis every week. Around 15,000 mobile phones and PDAs are handed in each year.