newspeak

E-waste: Crude recycling methods used in developing countries contaminate air, water and soil, researchers say — ScienceDaily.

““Our central assertion is that the new structure of global e-waste generation discovered here, combined with economic and social considerations, call for a serious reconsideration of e-waste policy,” the report notes.”

Developing world will produce double the e-waste of developed countries by 2016, study predicts — ScienceDaily.

Full article:

Neelu Jain, Pamela Chawla. Future outflows of toxic material from end-of-life computers in India. International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management, 2014; 17 (2/3/4): 237 DOI: 10.1504/IJETM.2014.061796

The point is that there is a lot of e-waste now and more to come, and it’s toxic. So far, little to nothing has really been done to address the problem that is and is to be.

One vector in the solution matrix: tablets and other lower-impact devices that also last a little longer.

Toxic computer waste in the developing world — ScienceDaily.

di-wp59 | School of Environment, Education and Development | The University of Manchester.

ICT4D stands for information and communication technology for development. It obviously encompasses a vast swath of work and includes, or can, open source and open standards technology. (Neither of those is necessarily linked to or used by developmental agencies or organizations. But I like to think that they offer tools and the means of making them that lead to sustainable communities.)

The document Richard Heeks has made available is useful as an annotated compendium:

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the post-2015 development agenda versus the current content and future direction of ICT4D policy and practice, as exemplified by WSIS+10 documentation.  These latter documents bring together nearly 1,000 pages of text that review the current state of ICT4D ten years after the foundational World Summits on the Information Society; and that seek to set out a vision of WSIS and of ICT4D beyond 2015.