Professor warns of computer e-waste mountain

SOFTWARE companies must do more to prevent billions of PCs being needlessly junked, risking damage to the environment, a university professor warned yesterday.

Peter Swann, professor of industrial economics at the University of Nottingham, said “software bloating” was leading to the need for people to scrap their computers regularly, creating mountains of “e-waste”.

He said the pressure to upgrade computers could mean up to 2.5 billion PCs would have been junked in total by 2013.