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.

He said: “Although computers look very beautiful, clean things, they do in fact have quite a lot of toxic material in them.

“I know our university has a policy that about every four years they upgrade our computers.

“The computers still work but they can’t run the software that is out now. Although they still work we throw them away because they can’t run the software.

“What I got into is whether it is avoidable or can be avoided if the software was designed in a different way.”

He said improvements in software meant more and more complex programmes were running in computers – many not needed by the average PC user. New software versions drain system resources in a process called “software bloat”, he said.

“The computer is running a large number of programmes in the background, all of which make heavy demands on it, most of which you probably don’t need but they are running there and you don’t know it.

“Part of the problem is each time a company like Microsoft brings out a new version of Windows it tends to require much more memory, so when you put the new version on it slows the computer down.

“The question is, do average users like you and me really need all these features in the new versions that cause the computer to slow down?

“I think for 90% of us the answer is no, we don’t need it but we upgrade to keep up with the software anyway. It seems to me an awful waste.”

Mr Swann’s study ‘Software Marketing and e- Waste: Standards for Sustainability’ found Moore’s Law – the theory that the power of a computer chip doubles every two years – meant software developers are not limited by concerns over memory constraints and have no incentive to optimise designs.

Last month a UN report ‘Recycling: from E-Waste to Resources’ warned of a growing mountains of hazardous e-waste at landfill sites in the developing world.

Mr Swann yesterday said software developers could play a vital role in reducing the need to constantly upgrade.