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| New life for old computers |
May 1, 2007 |
Don’t resell them, don’t toss them. Give old corporate PCs to people who need them
By Danny Bradbury
Old PCs never die. They end up in employees’ basements, they languish in storage cupboards or get sold on the secondhand market. Whichever route you choose, disposing of old corporate PCs can be a time-consuming and thankless process, and also potentially a dangerous one — if you fail to wipe your data clean. Wouldn’t it be more satisfying to dispose of them in a socially responsible way, perhaps by giving them to those who need them most, either at home or overseas?
Schoolchildren need computers. While Industry Canada’s SchoolNet program has worked to bring the Internet to every school in Canada, that’s only useful if classrooms actually have computers.
The department supplemented its broad connectivity focus by setting up Computers for Schools (CFS) in 1993. The organization, co-founded with TelecomPioneers, takes used PCs from public and private sector contributors, refurbishes them and ships them to Canadian schools through a nationwide network of 13 licensees.
CFS’s mandate is to refurbish the federal government’s surplus and used computers; government departments must give the organization right of refusal on all their old equipment. It collects roughly 110,000 computers per year from federal departments and another 80,000 units last year were donated from the private sector.
Ninety per cent of these machines are sent to Canadian schools, according to James Fulcher, director of policy, strategic planning at CFS. Some other PCs go to non-profits, although this isn’t in the official mandate.
High demand at home
In spite of its high-volume supply of PCs, CFS has never been able to meet the demand in Canada. It already supplies one in four of the PCs in Canada’s schools, but that is not enough. “My experience in this country is that some school boards are richer than others,” Fulcher said. “It’s a fact of life and in some respects it reflects the disparity of education in the country.”
Fulcher doesn’t know the extent of the backlog, but Shauna McCaffrey does. She is the executive director of Renewed Computer Technology (RCT), a non-profit licensed to operate the Ontario division of CFS. Her division, which processed 40,000 PCs last year, has a backlog of around 2,000 units.
“The supply side fluctuates. We’re trying to build around other people’s fulfillment cycles,” she said, adding that the quality of equipment also varies. Schools can’t realistically use anything older than Pentium 3 machines, so it has to recycle the older machines it receives (and for which it must charge a fee).
Other sources are more candid. “We still get requests for 12,000 computers, and a large school board recently sent an e-mail to all its schools saying that it didn’t have any money for computers. We were swamped by that school board,” said one harried licensee, adding “schools from every socio-economic part of the province are asking for computers, and a lot of them are saying that if they didn’t run [fundraisers], they couldn’t buy them.”
Even with a giant warehouse in Ottawa full of federal government PCs that get shipped to the provinces, there is only so much the organization can do with its funding, which Fulcher puts at around $6 million per year. The other problem is funding is never certain from year to year. “It’s hard to operate without long-term commitment,” he said, adding that licensees find it hard to plan ahead for their financial and human resource needs when they don’t know whether the next year’s money is there or not.
At the time of writing, the organization was waiting for confirmation of next year’s funding, said one source who was far from confident it would materialize. “It’s uncertain what the federal government is going to do with this program after this federal year,” he said, worrying the government is growing increasingly concerned about dabbling in what is supposed to be a provincially funded resource. “For the last three years, we’ve basically been funded at the last minute, but there has been constant uncertainty and discussion.”
CFS Canada makes $6 million go a long way, but others are achieving significant successes while eschewing the luxury of grants altogether. Computer Aid has turned itself into a sustainable business by charging NGOs for the PCs it delivers. The price — £39.99 (roughly $80) per unit — has enabled it to ship in excess of 70,000 PCs to more than 104 countries, largely under its own steam, and NGOs are happy to pay bottom dollar to get PCs where few, if any, machines are donated locally.
ReBoot Canada, a Toronto-based nonprofit that works independently of the Industry Canada initiative, also charges an administrative fee for the computers it refurbishes and provides to schools. This helps it to pick up the slack from its government-funded counterpart, argues executive director Richard Roxborough, adding, “That’s where the sustainability comes in.
“Twice a week we go out with the truck to companies that have a large amount of stuff to donate. It all comes back here to ReBoot Canada and we put it in our database so that we know what came from who.”
Co-op students from the local school boards are trained in refurbishment and are graded on their work. The company issues tax receipts for PCs that can be used, and even for Pentium 2 machines that can be harvested for parts.
Buidling IT in Africa
CFS’s success — more than 60,000 tonnes of ICT equipment refurbished to date — has prompted others around the world to copy its model. The International Development Research Centre (IRDC), a Canadian Crown corporation dedicated to helping researchers in the developing world, is incubating the Institute for Connectivity in the Americas (ICA), an initiative that will help promote the CFS model to developing countries. Columbia has adopted the working model, and others working toward this program include Argentina, Brazil and Costa Rica.
One of the most notable adopters of the CSF model is Kenya. Operating from its base in Nairobi, Computers for Schools Kenya (CFSK) is an independent organization that took the Canadian operation as its inspiration. Like many African countries, Kenya is working to build an information economy. The country, which held democratic elections in 2002, still struggles with poverty and famine, and schools are under-funded, with the government paying for teachers but little else.
Formed in 2002, CFS Kenya serves as a distribution hub for PCs donated from the West, and now distributes more than 3,000 PCs a year to Kenyan schools. One such school is Our Lady of Fatima, based in Kenya’s third largest slum, called Korogocho. The slum is a maze of narrow dirt streets winding between makeshift dwellings which are slung together from mud and turf and topped with corrugated tin roofs.
Illness runs through these streets, with young people, already orphaned by the country’s AIDS epidemic, working as prostitutes. There is no running water in most dwellings; instead, inhabitants queue at local standpipes. Education, too, is scarce.
Our Lady of Fatima sits on a small fenced-off field nestled within this sub-city. The church-funded school has received 25 PCs from CFSK, which it hopes will give local schoolchildren a way out of poverty.
Eighteen-year-old Linda Adhiambo Otieno, who was abandoned by her mother and raped as a child, now spends more than an hour each week learning IT skills on the computers at the school. “Computers let me get access and learn about other people around the world,” she said. “I can learn the history of other countries and current affairs.”
While CSF Kenya draws on CFS Canada for its operational model, its computers come from Computer Aid in the UK. Established in 1999, Computer Aid focuses on refurbishing and shipping donated computers internationally, rather than domestically.
CFS Canada sends few if any PCs abroad because international donations are not part of the organization’s mandate. And with such significant domestic demand, it really has no resources to spare.
SIDEBARS
Environmental impact
Unlike Europe and Canada, which are rolling out electronic waste legislation, Africa has few laws dictating how people dispose of electronic equipment. The electronics that end up in Africa include older CRT monitors, which contain glass heavily impregnated with lead and other toxins. These are notoriously difficult to recycle, and no facilities exist in Africa (or, indeed, in Computer Aid’s UK home) to safely dispose of them. So in Kenya, these chemicals end up in landfills, leaching into groundwater. Tony Roberts, chief executive for Computer Aid, said the existing inventory of CRT monitors will have passed through the supply chain before a solution emerges.
There is some good news, though. MIT has created a US$100 laptop specifically for developing countries. Also on the horizon are PCs from both AMD and Intel designed to be used in dusty, hostile environments with unreliable electricity supplies.
Ridding donated PCs of your data
A common misconception is that simply deleting a file will erase it from a hard drive forever. In reality, it is still there. In the NTFS file system used by most modern Windows PCs, data doesn’t get erased when deleted — it is marked as such by the operating system but left on the hard drive. Computer experts can retrieve data from the drive using tools available from the local retail store. Data must be physically eradicated rather than simply marked as deleted. Companies can do this by overwriting information with new data, changing the magnetic signal on the disk drive. A variety of tools are available, most of which will overwrite data several times to prevent it from being recovered. The other option is to physically destroy the drive, or to use an expensive hardware degaussing tool that will neutralize its magnetic charge. Using software tools on corporate equipment can take considerable time — as long as five hours to overwrite data three times on a 6GB drive. Firms such as Shell and Telus donate PCs to CSF, which will wipe data with DSX, a data erasure tool used by the RCMP.
Web donations
Computer Aid: www.computeraid.org
Computers for Schools: http://cfs-ope.ic.gc.ca
Computers for Schools Kenya: www.cfsk.org
International Development Research Centre: www.idrc.ca
ReBoot Canada: www.rebootcanada.ca
Renewed Computer Technology: www.rcto.ca
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