Once again, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which aims to produce affordable laptops for schoolchildren in the developing world, has announced a price hike (Are you doing your bit for the world?, Editor's diary, editor.computing.co.uk). The "$100 laptop" will now cost $188 when it finally goes into production. However, while the project's aims are admirable, it still hasn't got any customers.

Unfortunately, for the schoolchildren intended to receive the laptops, countries have to raise the massive amount of money required to order the laptops before production can start.

Shouldn't the IT industry be listening to Michael Dell, who pointed out at a press conference in July this year that the millions of functioning PCs that come out of circulation annually offer a much more realistic - and affordable - option for the world's poorest children?

The UK government is in agreement; the WEEE directive explicitly prioritises reuse over recycling. Yet Computer Aid, the world's biggest not-for-profit supplier of refurbished PCs to developing countries, faces a shortage of supply to meet the demand for thousands more reusable PCs to schools, colleges and hospitals in the developing world.

We have already shipped more than 95,000 PCs to help bridge the global digital divide. And these machines are making a significant difference to hundreds of thousands of lives.

As if that wasn't enough, reuse is also more environmentally responsible than recycling PCs, as a research project at the United Nations University in Tokyo has demonstrated. Professors Rudiger Kuerh and Eric Williams have shown that reusing a whole computer "is some 20 times more effective at saving lifecycle energy than recycling".

That is because the manufacture of PCs requires the consumption of more than 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels; 75 per cent of a PC's fossil fuel consumption happens before it is switched on. This is much higher than most electrical goods, which consume around 95 per cent of fossil fuels when in use.
For all these reasons, it is a terrible waste to recycle a computer straight off the corporate desktop when it is only three or four years old. That is why Computer Aid says: "Don't recycle - reuse!".

Tony Roberts
Computer Aid International