Useful Guide to Understanding Where All That Stuff Comes From

[Jcrowley]

Useful Guide to Understanding
Where All That Stuff Comes From
by Donella Meadows

Usually, as I boot up my computer to write this column, I'm thinking about the column, not the computer. Today, though, I've just finished reading Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, and I'm looking at my computer with awe. Stuff tells how the things that fill our lives--coffee and newspapers, T-shirts and hamburgers--are made. It traces athletic shoes, cars, French fries, colas back to their origins. And computers. The trails are fascinating, but not pretty.

Stuff says that the bland gray exterior of my computer is made of a plastic called ABS (acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene) crafted in a chemical plant near Los Angeles out of Saudi Arabian oil, Wyoming coal, and Texas natural gas. Tiny pellets of ABS were injected under heat and pressure into a mold, where they fused into the shape I now see before me.

<snip>

Workers wearing gowns, booties, and gloves use ultra-precise machinery to etch minute circuits on the silicon. Micromachines deposit phosphorus and boron in just the right places, then painstakingly thin layers of copper from Arizona, then an even thinner layer of gold. The circuits are built up in hundreds of steps, with cleaning and oxidation in between. To make one computer's chips, which weigh one-50th of a pound, a state-of-the-art plant uses 1,400 gallons of water and generates about 40 pounds of waste.

The finished wafers are packed in unbleached Douglas-fir pulp from Oregon and black plastic foam from Japan and shipped to Malaysia. In Kuala Lumpur, skilled workers earning about $2 an hour cut the wafers into individual chips and assemble them into "packages" mounted on a copper frame, molded into plastic and wired together with gold. Hardly a scrap of the expensive gold is wasted, but at the South African mine each pound of gold extracted piles up a million pounds of cyanide-treated toxic tailings. Back to California go the chip packages. There they are inserted into circuit boards, the wild mazes you see if you look inside a computer. The boards are made in Texas, out of copper, fiberglass, and epoxy resin. They are plated with copper from Chile, tin from Brazil, and lead recycled from Houston's dead car batteries. This step generates more hazardous waste than any other in the computer's fabrication.

The boards, case, monitor, and other pieces of my computer were transported by ship, truck, and rail to the final assembly plant in California, put together, packed in polystyrene foam and a cardboard box, and shipped another 3,000 miles to me. The manufacturing of my 55-pound computer generated 139 pounds of waste and used 7,300 gallons of water and 2,300 kilowatt-hours of energy. It will use four times that much energy again during its lifetime--energy that is generated by a nuclear power plant, a coal-fired plant and hydropower from the flooded lands of the Cree people at James Bay.

http://www.swans.com/library/art4/zig003.html

RIP Donella Meadows

[Ksec]

1. Gee, that makes me feel good about my computer....

not.
:)

[Jcrowley]

2. Pretty mind-boggling

isn't it? I remember reading this one page essay by Peter Bahouth titled "Attack of the killer tomato" which traced the journey of one tomato to his plate in Toronto and all that went into it. It was a real sharp snapshot into energy systems, the insanity of our economy, the true costs of our technology and the unsustainability of our everyday lives. Really opened my eyes at the time.

[Divernan]

3. The primary author of Stuff is my son, John Ryan

It's one of hundreds of articles and short books he's written. Am I proud? You betcha!

A few more snippets from the article:
The authors of Stuff, John Ryan and Alan Durning, do not intend to send us on guilt trips instead of shopping trips. They don't expect us to unplug our computers or bury our cars or "bite into some hot, salty fries and think about farmworkers' children with blue baby syndrome." They just want us to understand our world, and to use its products thoughtfully.

They talk about a sign in the Seattle Ship Canal that warns boaters, "No Wake." That's impossible, Ryan and Durning point out--you can't move a boat without creating waves that rock other boats. They prefer another sign that says, "Watch Your Wake. Wish Everyone Did!"

The book is available for $9.95 from Northwest Environment Watch, 1402 Third Ave., Suite 1127, Seattle, Washington, 98101-2118. You can phone toll-free [phone], or email [e-mail].

[Jcrowley]

4. I read this years ago

after hearing Alan Durning speak and it got me to thinking about the possibility that all of the wars we are witnessing, the global climate catastrophes, species extinction, the massive amount of displacement and accompanying hunger and so on are rather built into the way our everyday lives are structured. All of that Stuff comes from somewhere and to get to that Stuff it is usually necessary to remove people on the land and wreak no small amount of habitat destruction. Quite a dilemma to say the least.