de pitRiyadi

Lapan Operasikan Stasiun Bumi di Biak (ANTARA)

pitriyadi — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:51:32 +0000

Jumat, 22 Januari 2010 19:24 WIB

Jakarta (ANTARA News) – Lembaga Penerbangan dan Antariksa (Lapan) telah mengoperasikan stasiun bumi yang dibangunnya sendiri di Pulau Biak, Papua, demikian diumumkan Lapan hari ini di Jakarta.

Para teknisi Lapan membuat stasiun bumi itu dengan mengintegrasikan komponen-komponen yang dibelinya dan membuat sebagian software (perangkat lunak) sendiri untuk mengoperasikannya.

Sebuah kemajuan karena dua stasiun bumi sebelumnya yang ada di Rumpin dan Rancabungur, Bogor, bukan dibuat sendiri tetapi dibeli dari Amerika Serikat.

Stasiun bumi Biak digunakan untuk menerima data dari LAPAN-TUBSAT, satelit mikro yang berbobot hanya 100 kilogram yang dikembangkan bekerjasama dengan Universitas Teknik Berlin, Jerman.

LAPAN-TUBSAT diluncurkan ke orbit polar dengan ketinggian 635 km di atas permukaan bumi pada Januari 2007. Dengan dua kamera, satelit itu mampu memotret berdimensi 5 meter dan lebar 3,5 km serta 200 m dan lebar 81 km.

Perangkat komunikasi tersebut telah berhasil mengambil berbagai citra di wilayah Indonesia bagian barat, mencakup Singapura hingga Bali.

Pada tahun lalu, LAPAN-TUBSAT digunakan untuk memantau pembangunan jembatan Suramadu dan proyek jalan tol di wilayah utara Pulau Jawa. Citra LAPAN-TUBSAT dapat dilihat di situs www.lapantubsat.org.

Stasiun bumi Lapan di Biak memiliki antena untuk menangkap sinyal satelit berorbit rendah. Dalam menangkap sinyal satelit semacam itu, antena harus dapat bergerak atau berubah orientasi secara cepat karena satelit muncul dan hilang dari horizon dalam waktu singkat, kurang dari 15 menit.

Beroperasinya Stasiun Bumi penerima Biak menambah cakupan LAPAN-TUBSAT hingga wilayah Indonesia timur, bahkan hingga pantai utara Australia.

Keberhasilan beroperasinya stasiun bumi di Biak menunjukkan bahwa teknisi Lapan telah menguasai teknologi perekayasaan stasiun bumi untuk satelit orbit rendah.

Lapan akan membangun stasiun bumi serupa mulai awal tahun ini di Kotatabang, Sumatra Barat, sehingga menambah cakupan LAPAN-TUBSAT melampaui Aceh hingga Semenanjung Malaya.

Bila stasiun bumi Kototabang terwujud, maka hanya wilayah Indonesia bagian tengah saja yang belum tercakup LAPAN-TUBSAT. Namun, itu tidak berlangsung lama karena pada 2011 akan dibangun stasiun bumi di Parepare untuk menjangkau wilayah itu.

(*)

Jika ini adalah kehidupan….

pitriyadi — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:54:22 +0000

Jika ini adalah kehidupan, aku tak dapat meraihnya. Aku hidup dalam kesunyian jiwa yang selalu ada ketika aku menemukan adanya kepedulian pada sesama, aku tak dapat dan tak dapat aku menemukan cinta yang sangat aku dambakan. Hanyalah hati yang bersih yang dapat memeberikan perasaan yang penuh perhatian dan penjiwaan. Ketika cinta ini mendapat akhir pada jiwa-jiwa yang sangat aku dambakan adalah aku tak dapat mengatakan sepatah kata apapun.
Bunga berwarna ungu itu sangat aku suka. Aku tak dapat memberikan perasaan ini pada beberapa hal yang sangat aku pentingkan. Hanyalah padamu aku ingin memberikan perasaan ini, sampai pada rasa yang paling dalam ketika aku perlahan memulai asa. Kupetik setangkai bunga yang ada ketika aku tak dapat memberikan apapun yang aku harap pada sebuah ketamakan yang sangat aku benci.
Inilah hal yang aku tutup, inilah jalan yang luas, yang penuh dengan batas angan yang tak sampai kau harap kesalahan yang sangat aku damba pada sebuah asa. Jika aku mengharapkan ketika aku menemukan kasih yang tak dapat aku hadapkan permasalahan ini pada sebuah kebenaran yang hakiki.
Oh bunda, begitu besar dosa anakmu ini. Banyak hal yang sangat merugikanmu, aku benar-benar menjadi beban dlam hidup bunda… oh bunda maafkanlah segal kesalahan-kesalahan yang sangat ini bunda. Ketika jiwa ini ,erasa penat yang sangat dalam penetuan perjalanan hidup in aku sangat mengganggumu dalam segala hal. Aku mencintai bunda, aku merasa sangat membutuhkan bunda. Bunda segala doamu adalah doa-doa yang paling makbul. Di seberang jalan ini aku mulai berpikir tenang jalan hidup yang mulai berbelok, ketika aku jauh padamu.
Kutiti jalan yang penuh dengan belokan tajam yang sangat aku tak harapkan, tetapi ketika aku memimpikan sebuah jalan hanyalah jalan itulah yang harus kutuju. Aku tidak boleh petus asa, tak boleh membelokkan arah jalan yang harus kutempuh dengan jalann yang panjang pun aku harus memulainya. Sampai kapanpun aku selalu ingat tentang jalan hidup yang harus kutempuh sampai pada jalan yang panjang aku harus mendapatkan jiwa-jiwa itu,
Di sinilah aku hidup sebatang kara, aku sangat tak menentu sampai kapanpun aku harus memulai dengan sangat benar, ga boleh salah. Di sinailah jiwaku, di sinailah jalan yang harus kutempuh.

i’m Come back!!!

pitriyadi — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:38:57 +0000

Setelah udah lama vakum nih, saatnya unutk beraktivitas dengan semangat 45 kembali neh. Semangat ngeBLOG, n semangat ngerjain TA….
Tapi teman-teman hari ini n besok adalah hari terakhir ujian… uhhh semoga saja ssemua nialinya bagus…

Okey… I’m come back…

Indonesia Nomor Tujuh Pengakses Pornografi di Dunia

pitriyadi — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:11:01 +0000

Orang Indonesia kayaknya udah ga takut dengan apa yang dinamakannya dosa. Banyak sekali orang yang ngobrol, guyon, berseni, bahkan nonton yang bermuatan pornografi tanpa menetahui bahwa jika udah diakherat nanti kita akan masuk ke api neraka yang panas, sangat panas melebihi panasnya api lilin yang membakar tubuh kita bahkan lebih besar sekali jika mendekati apa yang dinamakan pornografi itu. Pornografi menurut salah satu ahli agama termasuk dalam kategori zina lho.

JAKARTA – Indonesia menempati peringkat ke tujuh dari sepuluh negara di dunia pengakses pornografi terbesar. Sementara itu, pendapatan dari industri pornografi saat ini mencapai USD97,6 Miliar yang lebih besar dari pendapatan delapan perusahaan teknologi informasi terbesar dunia.

“Bisa dihitung betapa besar keuntungan dari industri pornografi dan betapa besar kerugian yang ditimbulkan terhadap upaya pembangunan suatu negara terutama pembangunan sumber daya manusia,” kata Menteri Negara Pemberdayaan Perempuan (Meneg PP) Meutia Hatta kepada wartawan di Kantor Kemeneg PP di Jakarta, Rabu (9/4/2008).

Menurut Meutia, saat ini industri pornografi berkembang dengan pesat. Hal ini, katanya, membuktikan bahwa pornografi merupakan bisnis bernilai triliunan rupiah.

“Dan dilakukan oleh perusahaan-perusahan multinasional yang telah mencatatkan diri di bursa saham internasional,” terangnya.

Dari survey toptenreviews.com tahun 2006 tercatat 100.000 situs bermaterikan pornografi anak usia 18 tahun ke bawah. Rata-rata usia termuda anak-anak pengakses pornografi adalah 11 tahun. Sementara itu, di Indonesia sendiri hingga kini telah beredar 500 video porno dan 90 persennya dibuat dan dilakukan oleh para remaja yang masih berstatus pelajar atau mahasiswa.

“Keadaan ini diperparah lagi dimana negara kita belum mempunyai regulasi untuk mengatur industri pornografi. Sementara, pasar Asia adalah pasar baru potensial yang raksasa,” imbuhnya. (Rendra Hanggara/Sindo/hri)

Pemerintah Akan Turunkan Tarif Internet

pitriyadi — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:57:05 +0000

Kabar gembira nih bagi para internter di Indonesia, Internet murah, internet cepet siapa yang ga pengin ya?
Jakarta (ANTARA News) – Pemerintah melalui Dirjen Postel Departemen Komunikasi dan Informatika (Depkominfo) akan menurunkan tarif “leased line” internet dalam waktu dekat ini.

“Kita akan menurunkan tarif internet, tetapi untuk `leased line`,” kata Dirjen Postel Basuki Yusuf Iskandar usai menghadiri pertemuan Menkominfo Muhammad Nuh dengan para “blogger” (pembuat situs pribadi/blog) di kantor Depkominfo, Senin malam.

Akan tetapi Basuki tidak menjelaskan lebih lanjut besaran tarif penurunan internet tersebut.

Sebelumnya, pemerintah memutuskan memutuskan menurunkan biaya interkoneksi antara operator telekomunikasi berkisar 20-40 persen yang diimplementasikan pada 1 April 2008, yang mengindikasikan bahwa tarif ritel telekomunikasi seperti telepon tetap dan seluler juga akan turun

Menkominfo Muhammad Nuh, di Jakarta, Senin (4/2) mengatakan dengan penurunan tarif interkoneksi diharapkan tarif layanan komunikasi dari para operator akan turun sekitar 5-20 persen pada telepon tetap (fixed) dan penurunan tarif seluler berkisar 20-40 persen.

Konsekuensi dari penetapan tarif interkoneksi ini berdampak pada tarif ritel masing-masing operator. Dicontohkan, biaya interkoneksi originasi dan terminasi jaringan tetap dan jaringan tetap nirkabel (FWA) lokal, sebesar Rp143 per menit, sedangkan biaya interkoneksi sambungan jarak jauh (SLJJ) antar telepon tetap turun dari Rp1.138 per menit menjadi Rp1.120 per menit.

Sementara biaya interkoneksi suara untuk jaringan seluler ke jaringan tetepon tetap lokal sebesar Rp522 per menit, turun dari sebelumnya Rp721 per menit.

Biaya interkoneksi seluler ke seluler lokal Rp522 per menit dari sebelumnya Rp898 per menit. Sedangkan biaya interkoneksi seluler ke seluler sambungan jarak jauh Rp986 per menit dari sebelumnya Rp1.244 per menit.

PT Telkom Tbk, menyatakan menurunkan tarif percakapan SLJJ yang menggunakan telepon tetap berkisar 46 persen dengan persentase penurunan yang berbeda-beda menurut zona jarak dan pembedaan waktu (time band) dan akan diberlakukan efektif 8 April 2008, pukul 00.00 waktu setempat.

Vice President Public and Marketing Communication Telkom Eddy Kurnia mengatakan penurunan tarif berlaku untuk hampir seluruh percakapan SLJJ pada seluruh zona jarak dan waktu (timeband), baik dari telepon tetap ke telepon tetap (fixed to fixed) maupun dari telepon tetap ke seluler (fixed to mobile).

Eddy mencontohkan untuk biaya percakapan SLJJ dari telepon rumah ke seluler antara pk 07.00 s/d 08.00 pada zona 3 (jarak di atas 500 km) yang semula dikenakan Rp865 per 20 detik turun sekitar 46,2 persen menjadi hanya Rp465 per 20 detik.

Biaya percakapan SLJJ dari telepon tetap ke seluler antara pk 07.00 s/d 08.00 pada zone 1 (jarak 30 s/d 200 km) yang semula dikenakan Rp538,3 per 20 detik turun 44,3 persen menjadi Rp300 per 20 detik.

Telkom juga memberlakukan tarif flat percakapan SLJJ antara telepon rumah dan dari telepon rumah ke Flexi pada pk 23.00 s/d 06.00 ke seluruh Indonesia (tanpa memperhitungkan jarak) dengan tarif hanya Rp32 per 6 detik.(*)

Ketika aku KP alias kerja praktek…..

pitriyadi — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:33:28 +0000

Temen-temen ni aku sedang KP alias Kerja Praktek di Kota Cilegon di Propinsi ujung barat Pulau Jawa, dan termuda di Indonesia, BAnten……

Aku berangkat pas tanggal 17 Maret kemaren, perjalanan semarang – Cilegon 12jam pul time kutempuh dengan bus Rosalina eh Rosalia ye…. Sore berangkat mpe sini pagi deh. Kota Cilegon sebuah kota yang penuh dengan industri-industri yang muktakhir. Baru kali ini aku melihat kawasan industri yang luas, maklum wong ndeso.

akhirnya bersama 6 perjaka alin dari Semarang kami mulai bertahan hidup di Kota ini. kami tinggal di prum KR di rumah pak Markus dekat dengan pengelola KP kami. O iya perusahaan tempat aku bekerja praktek adalah PT KS, BUMN di kota ini. di divisi SSP2 bagian maintenance yang berproduksi slab baja.

INilah minggu pertama aku KP, cepet cuman ampe hari Rabu langsung libur dah, maklum tanggal merah. Setiap hari kami di antar dan di jemput dengan mobil bus dari perusahaan, puyeng ACnya kurang sip, meski begitu aku senang, buanyak kenalan dari UNiversitas laen, bisa kenal, tuker pengalaman atau curi-curi pandang. Ada dari Unand, IPB, UGM dan UNS. Cowok banyak, cewekpun banyak. Kesanku puas karena cantik-cantik khususnya dari IPB, buikin kemecer ni…… Astaghfirullah

Minggu pertama tiap hari bergadang ampe malem men catur, voly baca koran. Yang asyik tanding catur denagn bapak kost, akun puas.

Ini cerita minggu pertama KP, selanjutnya ada tulisannya lagi.

Robot pemotong rumput dengan tenaga matahari, pertama di dunia

pitriyadi — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 03:21:17 +0000

http://www.ecofriend.org

Kita sudah pernah dengar robot pembersih Roomba 500, yang dapat membersihkan lantai rumah secara otomatis. Nah, sekarang perkenalkan si robot pemotong rumput (lawn mower) yang diproduksi oleh Husqvarna, produsen pemotong rumput terbesar di dunia. Kehebatan produk ini selain dapat memotong rumput di halaman secara otomatis tanpa harus anda “pelototin” seperti anda “pelototin” si tukang kebun yang malas itu, robot ini juga menggunakan sumber daya tenaga matahari (solar powered) sebagai sumber tenaganya. Robot ini dapat memotong rumput di halaman seluas 2.300 meter persegi dan dapat dijadwal ulang untuk waktu pemotongannya. Dengan sensor yang ada, anda tidak perlu takut, si robot akan “memotong” bangku taman maupun selang anda yang ada di rumput.

Gates Minta Konggres Mengijinkan Lebih Banyak Pekerja Asing

pitriyadi — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 02:59:52 +0000

disunting dari www.beritanet.com

Untuk kedua kalinya Bill Gates kembali berbicara di Capitol Hill untuk meminta Konggres mengijinkan lebih banyak tenaga kerja asing bekerja membangun Amerika dan meminta lebih banyak alokasi anggaran pendapatan dari pajak untuk bidang pendidikan dan riset-penelitian.

Sebelumnya, Bill Gates juga telah melakukan hal yang serupa pada tahun lalu. Lebih lanjut Gates menyoroti daya saing Amerika terhadap globalisasi ekonomi yang terjadi. Gates meminta kepada Presiden Amerika yang akan datang untuk lebih berkomitmen dalam mempermudah prosedur masuknya tenaga kerja asing ke Amerika.

“Sangat tidak masuk akal membiarkan mereka (para pendatang-red) untuk belajar di universitas-universitas kita, bahkan seringkali juga mendapatkan subsidi dari pajak masyarakat Amerika, namun pada saat mereka telah selesai, mereka dapat begitu saja pulang ke negara mereka masing-masing”. Dari hal tersebut Gates berpikir mengapa tidak memanfaatkan mereka untuk sekaligus membangun Amerika. Semua itu dipaparkan Bill Gates dalam dengar pendapat selama 2 jam di depan House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee. Ia sendiri melihat banyak keunggulan dalam hal kualitas yang dimiliki oleh para pendatang itu. Oleh karenanya Gates melihat hal tersebut sebagai sebuah kesempatan berharga bagi Amerika untuk memanfaatkannya.

Namun muncul pula keberatan dari beberapa anggota konggres, seperti Dana Rohrabacher yang berasal dari Partai Republik – wilayah California. Ia menanyakan, “Apakah hal tersebut tidak akan melukai negara asal mereka dan apakah hal tersebut juga tidak akan membuat sebuah tekanan tersendiri bagi masyarakat di negara kita?”. Atas pertanyaan keberatan tersebut Bill Gates menjawab dengan tegas, “Tidak, karena orang-orang tersebut tetap akan dipekerjakan di manapun juga pada akhirnya. Pertanyaannya hanyalah di mana mereka akhirnya bekerja”. Menurut Gates, akan lebih baik jika tenaga kerja yang ia sebut ‘top people’ itu bisa dipekerjakan Amerika.

Rohrabacher mengatakan, bukan para ‘top people’ ini yang sedang ia bicarakan, namun justru yang sedang ia pikirkan adalah nasib para pelajar Amerika golongan B dan C (para pelajar yang tidak begitu unggul dalam kompetisi-red) yang berjuang untuk mendapatkan tempat di dunia kerja negerinya. Lebih lanjut menurutnya, adalah sesuatu yang tak termaafkan jika menggantikan tempat mereka dengan pelajar dari India.

Gates menanggapi hal tersebut dengan mencontohkan jika sebuah perusahaan seperti Microsoft mempekerjakan pendatang sebagai top engineers-nya, maka para top engineers ini kemudian akan membuatkan job untuk para pelajar golongan B dan C Amerika ini, dengan begitu maka para pelajar golongan B dan C ini masih dapat bekerja untuk mendukungnya. Jika perusahaan seperti Microsoft tidak mampu untuk mempekerjakan mereka, maka hal tersebut akan dilakukan oleh perusahaan lain di negara-negara lain pula dengan para pelajar golongan B dan C yang mereka miliki. Hal tersebut menurut Gates tentu saja akan merugikan Amerika.

Hingga saat ini seperti yang diketahui bersama, Microsoft merupakan salah satu perusahaan yang banyak mempekerjakan kaum intelektual dari luar Amerika. Hal tersebutlah yang mendorong Bill Gates untuk mengajak pemerintah Amerika untuk lebih membuka diri terhadap tenaga kerja asing. Dalam kesempatan itu, Konggres juga memuji Gates terkait dengan Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation yang didirikan Bill Gates dan istrinya untuk kegiatan sosial, terutama dalam penanggulangan HIV. Namun salah satu anggota Konggres dari Partai Republik, Laura Richardson meminta billionaire ini untuk dapat lebih banyak memberikan perhatian kepada bidang edukasi, terutama terkait dengan pemberian bea siswa.(dna)

World Environment Day 2008

pitriyadi — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:24:37 +0000

Ini tema peringatan Hari Lingkungan sedunia, namun untuk tema nasional Hari Lingkungan Hidup Nasional 2008 belum ditetapkan.(KLH)

SAMPAH-SAMPAH BARANG ELEKTRONIK-”High-Tech Trash”

pitriyadi — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:47:08 +0000

temen-temen ini ada artikel bagus dari national geographic channel. sebagi mahasiswa elektro saya merasa prihtin perkembangan elektronika di dunia ini memberiakan dampak yang luar biasa terhadap lingkungan hidup yang kita tempati ini. Sampah-sampah barang elektronik mulai dari komponen kecil sampai PC-PC bekas bahkan mein-mesin tua yang mengandung bahan berbahaya bagi lingkungan tersebar tak terurus di beberapa bagian dunia ini. Silahkan baca artikel ini atau sunting langsung saja di www.ngm.com atau baca juga majalah national geographic edisi Indonesia bulan Januari 2008 untuk versi lengkapa bahasa Indonesianya.

High-Tech Trash

Will your discarded TV end up in a ditch in Ghana?

By Chris Carroll

National Geographic Staff

Photograph by Peter Essick

June is the wet season in Ghana, but here in Accra, the capital, the morning rain has ceased. As the sun heats the humid air, pillars of black smoke begin to rise above the vast Agbogbloshie Market. I follow one plume toward its source, past lettuce and plantain vendors, past stalls of used tires, and through a clanging scrap market where hunched men bash on old alternators and engine blocks. Soon the muddy track is flanked by piles of old TVs, gutted computer cases, and smashed monitors heaped ten feet (three meters) high. Beyond lies a field of fine ash speckled with glints of amber and green—the sharp broken bits of circuit boards. I can see now that the smoke issues not from one fire, but from many small blazes. Dozens of indistinct figures move among the acrid haze, some stirring flames with sticks, others carrying armfuls of brightly colored computer wire. Most are children.

Choking, I pull my shirt over my nose and approach a boy of about 15, his thin frame wreathed in smoke. Karim says he has been tending such fires for two years. He pokes at one meditatively, and then his top half disappears as he bends into the billowing soot. He hoists a tangle of copper wire off the old tire he’s using for fuel and douses the hissing mass in a puddle. With the flame retardant insulation burned away—a process that has released a bouquet of carcinogens and other toxics—the wire may fetch a dollar from a scrap-metal buyer.

Another day in the market, on a similar ash heap above an inlet that flushes to the Atlantic after a downpour, Israel Mensah, an incongruously stylish young man of about 20, adjusts his designer glasses and explains how he makes his living. Each day scrap sellers bring loads of old electronics—from where he doesn’t know. Mensah and his partners—friends and family, including two shoeless boys raptly listening to us talk—buy a few computers or TVs. They break copper yokes off picture tubes, littering the ground with shards containing lead, a neurotoxin, and cadmium, a carcinogen that damages lungs and kidneys. They strip resalable parts such as drives and memory chips. Then they rip out wiring and burn the plastic. He sells copper stripped from one scrap load to buy another. The key to making money is speed, not safety. “The gas goes to your nose and you feel something in your head,” Mensah says, knocking his fist against the back of his skull for effect. “Then you get sick in your head and your chest.” Nearby, hulls of broken monitors float in the lagoon. Tomorrow the rain will wash them into the ocean.

People have always been proficient at making trash. Future archaeologists will note that at the tail end of the 20th century, a new, noxious kind of clutter exploded across the landscape: the digital detritus that has come to be called e-waste.

More than 40 years ago, Gordon Moore, co-founder of the computer-chip maker Intel, observed that computer processing power roughly doubles every two years. An unstated corollary to “Moore’s law” is that at any given time, all the machines considered state-of-the-art are simultaneously on the verge of obsolescence. At this very moment, heavily caffeinated software engineers are designing programs that will overtax and befuddle your new turbo-powered PC when you try running them a few years from now. The memory and graphics requirements of Microsoft’s recent Vista operating system, for instance, spell doom for aging machines that were still able to squeak by a year ago. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an estimated 30 to 40 million PCs will be ready for “end-of-life management” in each of the next few years.

Computers are hardly the only electronic hardware hounded by obsolescence. A switchover to digital high-definition television broadcasts is scheduled to be complete by 2009, rendering inoperable TVs that function perfectly today but receive only an analog signal. As viewers prepare for the switch, about 25 million TVs are taken out of service yearly. In the fashion-conscious mobile market, 98 million U.S. cell phones took their last call in 2005. All told, the EPA estimates that in the U.S. that year, between 1.5 and 1.9 million tons of computers, TVs, VCRs, monitors, cell phones, and other equipment were discarded. If all sources of electronic waste are tallied, it could total 50 million tons a year worldwide, according to the UN Environment Programme.

So what happens to all this junk?

In the United States, it is estimated that more than 70 percent of discarded computers and monitors, and well over 80 percent of TVs, eventually end up in landfills, despite a growing number of state laws that prohibit dumping of e-waste, which may leak lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, beryllium, and other toxics into the ground. Meanwhile, a staggering volume of unused electronic gear sits in storage—about 180 million TVs, desktop PCs, and other components as of 2005, according to the EPA. Even if this obsolete equipment remains in attics and basements indefinitely, never reaching a landfill, this solution has its own, indirect impact on the environment. In addition to toxics, e-waste contains goodly amounts of silver, gold, and other valuable metals that are highly efficient conductors of electricity. In theory, recycling gold from old computer motherboards is far more efficient and less environmentally destructive than ripping it from the earth, often by surface-mining that imperils pristine rain forests.

Currently, less than 20 percent of e-waste entering the solid waste stream is channeled through companies that advertise themselves as recyclers, though the number is likely to rise as states like California crack down on landfill dumping. Yet recycling, under the current system, is less benign than it sounds. Dropping your old electronic gear off with a recycling company or at a municipal collection point does not guarantee that it will be safely disposed of. While some recyclers process the material with an eye toward minimizing pollution and health risks, many more sell it to brokers who ship it to the developing world, where environmental enforcement is weak. For people in countries on the front end of this arrangement, it’s a handy out-of-sight, out-of-mind solution.

Many governments, conscious that electronic waste wrongly handled damages the environment and human health, have tried to weave an international regulatory net. The 1989 Basel Convention, a 170-nation accord, requires that developed nations notify developing nations of incoming hazardous waste shipments. Environmental groups and many undeveloped nations called the terms too weak, and in 1995 protests led to an amendment known as the Basel Ban, which forbids hazardous waste shipments to poor countries. Though the ban has yet to take effect, the European Union has written the requirements into its laws.

The EU also requires manufacturers to shoulder the burden of safe disposal. Recently a new EU directive encourages “green design” of electronics, setting limits for allowable levels of lead, mercury, fire retardants, and other substances. Another directive requires manufacturers to set up infrastructure to collect e-waste and ensure responsible recycling—a strategy called take-back. In spite of these safeguards, untold tons of e-waste still slip out of European ports, on their way to the developing world.

In the United States, electronic waste has been less of a legislative priority. One of only three countries to sign but not ratify the Basel Convention (the other two are Haiti and Afghanistan), it does not require green design or take-back programs of manufacturers, though a few states have stepped in with their own laws. The U.S. approach, says Matthew Hale, EPA solid waste program director, is instead to encourage responsible recycling by working with industry—for instance, with a ratings system that rewards environmentally sound products with a seal of approval. “We’re definitely trying to channel market forces, and look for cooperative approaches and consensus standards,” Hale says.

The result of the federal hands-off policy is that the greater part of e-waste sent to domestic recyclers is shunted overseas.

“We in the developed world get the benefit from these devices,” says Jim Puckett, head of Basel Action Network, or BAN, a group that opposes hazardous waste shipments to developing nations. “But when our equipment becomes unusable, we externalize the real environmental costs and liabilities to the developing world.”

Asia is the center of much of the world’s high-tech manufacturing, and it is here the devices often return when they die. China in particular has long been the world’s electronics graveyard. With explosive growth in its manufacturing sector fueling demand, China’s ports have become conduits for recyclable scrap of every sort: steel, aluminum, plastic, even paper. By the mid-1980s, electronic waste began freely pouring into China as well, carrying the lucrative promise of the precious metals embedded in circuit boards.

Vandell Norwood, owner of Corona Visions, a recycling company in San Antonio, Texas, remembers when foreign scrap brokers began trolling for electronics to ship to China. Today he opposes the practice, but then it struck him and many other recyclers as a win-win situation. “They said this stuff was all going to get recycled and put back into use,” Norwood remembers brokers assuring him. “It seemed environmentally responsible. And it was profitable, because I was getting paid to have it taken off my hands.” Huge volumes of scrap electronics were shipped out, and the profits rolled in.

Any illusion of responsibility was shattered in 2002, the year Puckett’s group, BAN, released a documentary film that showed the reality of e-waste recycling in China. Exporting Harm focused on the town of Guiyu in Guangdong Province, adjacent to Hong Kong. Guiyu had become the dumping ground for massive quantities of electronic junk. BAN documented thousands of people—entire families, from young to old—engaged in dangerous practices like burning computer wire to expose copper, melting circuit boards in pots to extract lead and other metals, or dousing the boards in powerful acid to remove gold.

China had specifically prohibited the import of electronic waste in 2000, but that had not stopped the trade. After the worldwide publicity BAN’s film generated, however, the government lengthened the list of forbidden e-wastes and began pushing local governments to enforce the ban in earnest.

On a recent trip to Taizhou, a city in Zhejiang Province south of Shanghai that was another center of e-waste processing, I saw evidence of both the crackdown and its limits. Until a few years ago, the hill country outside Taizhou was the center of a huge but informal electronics disassembly industry that rivaled Guiyu’s. But these days, customs officials at the nearby Haimen and Ningbo ports—clearinghouses for massive volumes of metal scrap—are sniffing around incoming shipments for illegal hazardous waste.

High-tech scrap “imports here started in the 1990s and reached a peak in 2003,” says a high school teacher whose students tested the environment around Taizhou for toxics from e-waste. He requested anonymity from fear of local recyclers angry about the drop in business. “It has been falling since 2005 and now is hard to find.”

Today the salvagers operate in the shadows. Inside the open door of a house in a hillside village, a homeowner uses pliers to rip microchips and metal parts off a computer motherboard. A buyer will burn these pieces to recover copper. The man won’t reveal his name. “This business is illegal,” he admits, offering a cigarette. In the same village, several men huddle inside a shed, heating circuit boards over a flame to extract metal. Outside the door lies a pile of scorched boards. In another village a few miles away, a woman stacks up bags of circuit boards in her house. She shoos my translator and me away. Continuing through the hills, I see people tearing apart car batteries, alternators, and high-voltage cable for recycling, and others hauling aluminum scrap to an aging smelter. But I find no one else working with electronics. In Taizhou, at least, the e-waste business seems to be waning.

Yet for some people it is likely too late; a cycle of disease or disability is already in motion. In a spate of studies released last year, Chinese scientists documented the environmental plight of Guiyu, the site of the original BAN film. The air near some electronics salvage operations that remain open contains the highest amounts of dioxin measured anywhere in the world. Soils are saturated with the chemical, a probable carcinogen that may disrupt endocrine and immune function. High levels of flame retardants called PBDEs—common in electronics, and potentially damaging to fetal development even at very low levels—turned up in the blood of the electronics workers. The high school teacher in Taizhou says his students found high levels of PBDEs in plants and animals. Humans were also tested, but he was not at liberty to discuss the results.

China may someday succeed in curtailing electronic waste imports. But e-waste flows like water. Shipments that a few years ago might have gone to ports in Guangdong or Zhejiang Provinces can easily be diverted to friendlier environs in Thailand, Pakistan, or elsewhere. “It doesn’t help in a global sense for one place like China, or India, to become restrictive,” says David N. Pellow, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies electronic waste from a social justice perspective. “The flow simply shifts as it takes the path of least resistance to the bottom.”

It is next to impossible to gauge how much e-waste is still being smuggled into China, diverted to other parts of Asia, or—increasingly—dumped in West African countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and Ivory Coast. At ground level, however, one can pick out single threads from this global toxic tapestry and follow them back to their source.

In Accra, Mike Anane, a local environmental journalist, takes me down to the seaport. Guards block us at the gate. But some truck drivers at a nearby gas station point us toward a shipment facility just up the street, where they say computers are often unloaded.

There, in a storage yard, locals are opening a shipping container from Germany. Shoes, clothes, and handbags pour out onto the tarmac. Among the clutter: some battered Pentium 2 and 3 computers and monitors with cracked cases and missing knobs, all sitting in the rain. A man hears us asking questions. “You want computers?” he asks. “How many containers?”

Near the port I enter a garage-like building with a sign over the door: “Importers of British Used Goods.” Inside: more age-encrusted PCs, TVs, and audio components. According to the manager, the owner of the facility imports a 40-foot (12 meters) container every week. Working items go up for sale. Broken ones are sold for a pittance to scrap collectors.

All around the city, the sidewalks are choked with used electronics shops. In a suburb called Darkuman, a dim stall is stacked front to back with CRT monitors. These are valueless relics in wealthy countries, particularly hard to dispose of because of their high levels of lead and other toxics. Apparently no one wants them here, either. Some are monochrome, with tiny screens. Boys will soon be smashing them up in a scrap market.

A price tag on one of the monitors bears the label of a chain of Goodwill stores headquartered in Frederick, Maryland, a 45-minute drive from my house. A lot of people donate their old computers to charity organizations, believing they’re doing the right thing. I might well have done the same. I ask the proprietor of the shop where he got the monitors. He tells me his brother in Alexandria, Virginia, sent them. He sees no reason not to give me his brother’s phone number.

When his brother Baah finally returns my calls, he turns out not to be some shady character trying to avoid the press, but a maintenance man in an apartment complex, working 15-hour days fixing toilets and lights. To make ends meet, he tells me, he works nights and weekends exporting used computers to Ghana through his brother. A Pentium 3 brings $150 in Accra, and he can sometimes buy the machines for less than $10 on Internet liquidation websites—he favors private ones, but the U.S. General Services Administration runs one as well. Or he buys bulk loads from charity stores. (Managers of the Goodwill store whose monitor ended up in Ghana denied selling large quantities of computers to dealers.) Whatever the source, the profit margin on a working computer is substantial.

The catch: Nothing is guaranteed to work, and companies always try to unload junk. CRT monitors, though useless, are often part of the deal. Baah has neither time nor space to unpack and test his monthly loads. “You take it over there and half of them don’t work,” he says disgustedly. All you can do then is sell it to scrap people, he says. “What they do with it from that point, I don’t know nothing about it.”

Baah’s little exporting business is just one trickle in the cataract of e-waste flowing out of the U.S. and the rest of the developed world. In the long run, the only way to prevent it from flooding Accra, Taizhou, or a hundred other places is to carve a new, more responsible direction for it to flow in. A Tampa, Florida, company called Creative Recycling Systems has already begun.

The key to the company’s business model rumbles away at one end of a warehouse—a building-size machine operating not unlike an assembly line in reverse. “David” was what company president Jon Yob called the more than three-million-dollar investment in machines and processes when they were installed in 2006; Goliath is the towering stockpile of U.S. e-scrap. Today the machine’s steel teeth are chomping up audio and video components. Vacuum pressure and filters capture dust from the process. “The air that comes out is cleaner than the ambient air in the building,” vice president Joe Yob (Jon’s brother) bellows over the roar.

A conveyor belt transports material from the shredder through a series of sorting stations: vibrating screens of varying finenesses, magnets, a device to extract leaded glass, and an eddy current separator—akin to a reverse magnet, Yob says—that propels nonferrous metals like copper and aluminum into a bin, along with precious metals like gold, silver, and palladium. The most valuable product, shredded circuit boards, is shipped to a state-of-the-art smelter in Belgium specializing in precious-metals recycling. According to Yob, a four-foot-square (1.2-meter-square) box of the stuff can be worth as much as $10,000.

In Europe, where the recycling infrastructure is more developed, plant-size recycling machines like David are fairly common. So far, only three other American companies have such equipment. David can handle some 150 million pounds (68 million kilograms) of electronics a year; it wouldn’t take many more machines like it to process the entire country’s output of high-tech trash. But under current policies, pound for pound it is still more profitable to ship waste abroad than to process it safely at home. “We can?t compete economically with people who do it wrong, who ship it overseas,” Joe Yob says. Creative Recycling?s investment in David thus represents a gamble—one that could pay off if the EPA institutes a certification process for recyclers that would define minimum standards for the industry. Companies that rely mainly on export would have difficulty meeting such standards. The EPA is exploring certification options.

Ultimately, shipping e-waste overseas may be no bargain even for the developed world. In 2006, Jeffrey Weidenhamer, a chemist at Ashland University in Ohio, bought some cheap, Chinese-made jewelry at a local dollar store for his class to analyze. That the jewelry contained high amounts of lead was distressing, but hardly a surprise; Chinese-made leaded jewelry is all too commonly marketed in the U.S. More revealing were the amounts of copper and tin alloyed with the lead. As Weidenhamer and his colleague Michael Clement argued in a scientific paper published this past July, the proportions of these metals in some samples suggest their source was leaded solder used in the manufacture of electronic circuit boards.

“The U.S. right now is shipping large quantities of leaded materials to China, and China is the world’s major manufacturing center,” Weidenhamer says. “It’s not all that surprising things are coming full circle and now we’re getting contaminated products back.” In a global economy, out of sight will not stay out of mind for long.