(Everything taken from www.laurierrochon.com/plants)
On March 22nd 2009, I went to a used computer store in Montreal and acquired old hardware components that were destined to be thrown away. I brought them home, took them apart, filled the different pieces with soil and put various plant and flower seeds in them. In the weeks that followed, I looked after them and documented the growing process, transforming “e-waste” in a receptacle for new life. The result was a book, printed and bound. It can also be downloaded in low-res (see link atop the page).
We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction.
- E. Burtynsky
This project takes aim at raising the issue of e-waste and how to deal with the “technologization” of our society. I wanted to explore what it meant to be among the technology leaders of the world, and having to dispose of hardware that becomes obsolete in a very short amount of time. This class was called “imagined futures”, and I tried to capture what was left behind when a society pushed forward, in the name of progress and evolution.
My research findings have revealed that it is very hard for individuals in Canada to get rid of a personal computer – since they are extremely complex and cannot be taken apart by machines, yet way too toxic to be simply trashed. Given this, industrialized countries usually have to 1) ship them out to a third-world country, where poor people will melt them by hand and separate the pieces to their health’s expense or 2) deal with the pollution caused by all the toxic metals (ex: led) comprised in the computers, hoping nobody will discover what they have done.
Needless to say this is a very important issue we will have to consider if we keep, as a society, striving for technological progress and we decide this is something important for us. I think a great illustration of this situation is the SchoolNet program initiated and successfully completed at the beginning of this decade by the Federal Government. Schools with internet connections and computers were wired up across Canada, allowing for unprecedented access to information; but today these computers are aging, and will need to be replaced very soon, all 500 000 of them.
Will the Government spend millions of dollars to hire people here in Canada and get them torn apart locally? Save on the labor costs and get third-world country children to do it for us? Use Russian techniques and dump everything beneath the north pole?
I think this is very important to think about, and I cannot understand how there is still no surtax to cover the cost of unmounting computers (especially that they are extremely cheap now), that we have no proper recycling system in place, and not much of a discussion going on in our society about this problem.
