Tuesday is trash day around here, which means that by Monday evening our neighborhood is packed with bags of trash and piles of stuff that is not as trashy. OK, maybe the whole lot is just rather trashy but there are certain things that don’t really belong on the curb… Take this week’s catch, which has been sitting there, in its best behavior, for a few days now through rain and sunshine. Yes, today’s catch is a computer. Granted that it’s an old one, but it’s still a computer. Oh, and no, this isn’t the first one I have seen around here
It puzzles me that people just decide to trash a computer without first considering giving it away. Yes, I know, maybe it’s broken or too slow to work but still, is this an adequate item for the trash? In my opinion, it is not. First of all, and let me just state the obvious!, it contains someone’s personal data. And if their dumb enough to leave the computer on the curb, I bet they’re dumb enough to not have deleted the data. Oh, you know, reformat the hard-drive. Of course that would still not totally erase all the data, but it would be better than nothing, but I digress…
Then there’s the issue of biodegradability. A computer is not exactly biodegradable. So it is likely that it is going to stick around for a few thousand years. Imagine those future archaeologists, how happy they will be when they find this device that contains several documents that you wrote. Important things, such as your paper for English class, your math assignments and your bank statements. Clearly, you did future generations a great deal of good by sending it to the landfill.
Or did you? If the elements do not treat it kindly, that little computer may just start to “rot.” I wonder if there is anything in there that could leach through the landfill into some underground water. Luckily, if the water is underground, it’s not navigable and thus the Clean Water Act does not apply. Hence, we may live happily ever after because nothing bad can ever come out of it…
