Changing habits

HP takes back lots of PCs and printers through its trade-in program but finds users are much less willing to hand in servers or storage units because of security concerns. This is just one example of a much broader need for behavioural change discussed by attendees at a recent ARN round table.

Michael Blumentals, DPI Systems (MB): If you look at the number of small businesses in Australia, with less than 10 employees and two or three servers, those are the guys that are creating the problem. A large company might have 20 racks full of gear but for every one of those organisations there are thousands of small businesses out there creating a much bigger problem. That is where the education and some of the pitch needs to be. If the solution is easy enough I think there's the social conscience there to do it.

Angus Jones, HP (AJ): If you look at the different domestic wheelie bins today there's one for rubbish, one for paper and one for bottles but those are things that come out of our households every day. You wouldn't put a computer bin out there because it's unlikely anything would be put in it. When you change the oil in a car do you pour it down a sink, throw it in a wheelie bin or take it to a waste transfer station? Car batteries are exactly the same. Maybe transfer stations should have computer recycling facilities and make it easy. You can already take oil or old washing machines there and you do not pay.

MB:That's because there's a value attached to them.

AJ: There is and there's no reason from a computer perspective why you couldn't do the same thing. John Deacon, Astron Technology (JD): There's been a very big push from the Sims Group to lobby the government. If you pay rates, the council should make environmental bins available at certain times throughout the year where mums and dads can drop off the old TV or CRT monitor.

AJ: Waste transfer stations are within driving distance for everybody. JD: Yes, but if they do it under a council big bang approach where they have skips, the recycler has a significant enough pull to get some cost out of the recycling. They are not going to stick it back out on the market but they can break it down into components. That will reduce costs for the council and the consumer. Up to 50 per cent of recycling costs are in the transport.

Peter Robinson, Vigil Tech (PR): I think we will see a whole new set of companies arise in that end-of-life business because look at recycling and reuse in other industries. If you've got a 20-year-old Commodore to get rid of, you don't ring General Motors do you? It's a specialised business and our industry is very much in its infancy in that regard.

Stuart Ellis, Ingram Micro (SE): I agree. When you buy a car or a fridge, you are not talking to the sales guy about how you will eventually get rid of it.

Mark McWilliams, Datacom (MM):Not that long ago, disposal wasn't much of a problem because old PCs would go into schools. They won't put up with a three-year-old PC anymore.

JD:You can sell disposal through PR. All you need to do is tell the IT department that the Pentium III machines they are about to give to a school will end up in a dumpster in a few months' time when they realise it's just a whole bunch of tin that's not worth anything. The reverse PR can be very bad and the same goes for negating cost because the cost of disposal isn't huge. Victoria and the ACT are the only legislated environmental electronic recycling states but does a customer want 100 devices turning up in a dumpster somewhere with their company name on them? Do they really want to bear that cost for the sake of $3000 to dispose of 100 machines? Typically, that is the last thing they want.

MM: Once we get every household away from putting old PCs in a skip, it will flow up into business. Gerard Florian, Dimension Data (GF): There are lots of top down pressures, whether it's legislative or from the board, but you also have to consider drivers coming from the bottom up. At Dimension Data we have reacted to staff asking what we are going to do in this [environment] space. You are going to see more and more people saying they want to work for an organisation that is doing the right thing.

Is that a generational thing?

GF: It depends who you believe. According to the last stats I saw, something like 92 per cent of Australians think it's an issue. Whether they are prepared to put their hands in their pockets is a different discussion.

JD: I think once an organisation signs off once it is fait accompli and the door shuts.

Ron De Kok, HP (RDK): It is a generational thing because kids today are more green-oriented than we are. As they progress through business their ideas will be impressed on how those organisations run. Today, businesses are run by people that have old ideas and we are hard-pushed to change.