I know this is a little off the usual music topic, but we deal with things in Hawai’i everyday and I am pretty passionate about waste in the islands.
O’ahu is an island, a very small island with over 900,000 people on it. Think about this… O’ahu is roughly 597 square miles big, that’s roughly 3,150,000 (bad math, I was corrected) 2.4 billion square feet. Divide that by 900,000 people and that’s roughly one person for every 3.2 2,600 square feet. Minus two huge mountain ranges, and concentrate in Honolulu city, and we could probably stand evenly spaced holding hands. That’s incredible.
I bring up this point, because if you think about your daily waste: paper, water bottles, toilet flushes, sink drains, etc., multiply that 900,000 times. Granted, for things like waste water, paper and bottles, there are ways to recycle and reuse. But e-waste? If you buy a new computer every 3 years, that’s 300,000 computers being thrown away every year. That’s 300,000 printers, cartridges, screens, CPUs, motherboards, video cards, RAM and hard drives being thrown into Hawai’i’s landfills every year.
So please, if you live in Hawai’i, or anywhere in the world, take advantage of these e-waste days and spread the word! Tell your friends, tell your family to take their old computers, monitors, printers, phones, chargers, keyboards and mice so that it doesn’t end up in our landfills and leak into our land.
For more information about the University of Hawai’i e-waste project: http://mdna.co/h and http://www.hawaii.edu/ewaste/
Aloha,
Nick
Thanks to @markrau for the math correction.