Green IT Toolkit

CRTs: The price of progress

Tags:
CRT,
Recycle

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 06 May 2004 16:08 BST

Today is a good day. The piles of CRT monitors that force me to walk an extra three feet on the twice-daily jaunt from reception to my desk are finally being removed. Getting rid of those ugly, clunky hunks of outdated tech and replacing them with thin, sleek, optimism-inducing LCD screens has been genuinely life-affirming. The whole office is now basking in the therapeutic glow of progress.

At the risk of gushing here, the new screens have also made our open-plan office even more open – for good or bad the beaming visages of colleagues are now completely visible. No more conversations with a tuft of hair sprouting behind a distant monitor.

Actually, being able to see each other might even help us break the IM habit that seems to have ensnared the whole team. Why go to the pesky effort of actually peering around a monitor and talking to someone when you can silently whiz a message across the office? God forbid we should use the chance to chat with colleagues to deviate from praying to the lit-up deity of the computer.

During a screen-break trip to the bathroom, I happen to catch sight of one of the offending CRT bricks being lugged through reception. Another one bites the dust. Only 30 or so of the buggers to go before they are out of sight and out of mind.

But looking at the rest of the offending blobs on the floor awaiting their fate, an unspecific wave of guilt hits me. It's the same feeling I get chucking something extremely inorganic into the kitchen bin -- only fleeting but definitely there. How long is that going to take to break down? A plastic detergent bottle must have a half-life of several millennia. It's a sobering thought that a liquid toilet cleaner container will surpass your legacy by several hundred generations.

If industry figures are accurate, then these feelings of guilt probably aren't limited to my immediate vicinity; piles of old CRTs should be inducing similar pangs across the country. There are about a million tonnes of glass from TVs and monitors sitting in homes and offices and most of this will be entering the waste stream within the next 10 to 15 years, according to the director of the UK Industry Council for Electronic Equipment Recycling (ICER), Clare Snow.