Topic2

Topic 2
**Environmental issues related to the production of computer components and supplies**  **by Joseph Toyoshima **

What are environmental issues related to the production of computer components and supplies? Technology is growing at a rapid rate everyday. What we thought as great and convenient are being quickly replaced. With this rapid rate of replacement, there is an accelerated huge quantity of disposal. Producing computers can be very hazardous; the usages of the computer raw materials have health risks and create certain pollution to the air.

When computers are recycled, the toxic materials in the computers are released. These materials include fossil fuels, chemical water, those that are used in production. The production hazards exceeds up to lawsuits filed by the workers. But those are the health hazards only within the population of the workers; when improperly recycled, these risks are released into the air our everyday air.

Solutions to this problem can be solved by the economical concept of internalizing the economy. When computers are produced, it releases a negative externality, the production hazards. But when sold, computer manufactures do not include the cost of the hazards; they only include the costs of production. So to resolve the problem, the government should step in and tax the computer production.

This would raise the price and therefore decreasing the quantity of computer production. The tax money can be used to help in the research to decrease the hazards released and/or to pay for those affected. They could also use tradable permits, a maximum amount of the hazard production allowed per company that can be traded. Since these permits can be traded, many companies would attempt to find ways to reduce the hazards when producing computers so that if they have leftover permits they can trade it to other companies. Both of these ways would reduce the hazards and can help find ways to decrease when producing.

Hazards can be prevented by “proper” computer recycling. This can be hard because there is no actual way to just make the computers disappear without affecting the atmosphere. Governments can put a high tax on computer disposal and then people would decide try to keep the computers for a maximized time until getting a newer one. With the tax, government can support groups that attempt to find good ways to efficiently and safely dispose computers. People can give away computers, those that they no longer want to use can be transferred to one another from a certain donation community. By using this method, since less people would buy computers now, computer production would be decreased. This would also severely reduce the amount of computers needed to be destroyed, therefore lessening the amount of hazards being released into the air.

All of these solutions can be successful in any amount in decreasing the hazards of computers, but they also decrease the production of them. Almost everyone in a first world country have a computer. Decreasing the speed of improvement and production can also halt our advancements as a country, and also better technology for our convenience. In order to most efficiently solve this problem, the computer production must remain while the hazards released our decreased. But this solution can only be long-term and in the short-term decision makers have to choose between the health and technology.