Editorial: Sorry caller, the world has changed

I'm old enough to be one of those people who muttered darkly in the late 1980s, "You won't catch me with a mobile phone."

There were quite a number of us like that back then. Perhaps you were one of us.

It's not that we were determined to mark ourselves out as Luddites, it was more that we had started our working lives in what we now recognise as the dying days of a different era.

A lot of individuals could not afford mobile phones but our employers could and by the early 90s they were requesting we carry one and leave it on at all times.

And there was the rub - not so much the mobile phone itself but the fact that our bosses, the businesses we worked for, were now demanding access to our lives 24/7. It was the first step down a road of rapidly escalating access to telecommunications and digital data. The world was becoming akin to a room in which the lights were always on.

The refuseniks among us couldn't hold out for long and, looking back, one can only chuckle at the hopelessness of our case. It's a digital world. The handheld is omnipotent.

Few of us had the prescience "back in the day" to understand how swift and all-encompassing the digital revolution would be. We simply could not imagine how a phone the size of a brick would evolve into an iPhone 4s capable of video, graphics, websites, data, photography, games, voice-recognition, music, email, texting, oh, and a phone call should you feel the need for such an old-fashioned concept.

Now, few of us can conceive of life without some sort of hand-held device.

The old mobile phones are being junked along with similarly outmoded PCs, laptops, CD players, televisions, etc.

This stuff is known as e-waste, a modern phenomenon which has become something of a problem in Hastings since the closure of E-Waste Recycling Hawke's Bay in November, but less so in Napier where recycler RCN operates an e-cycle programme.

RCN project manager Jon Thornhill points out that despite the massive amount of e-waste created annually as individuals and businesses upgrade their technology, the easy option is still to dump the unwanted material at the landfill.

What is required, he suggests, is legislation preventing the dumping of e-waste. There is a market for recycled components and materials from e-waste and a ban on dumping (effectively mandatory recycling) would increase the likelihood of businesses scaling up around this.

That makes a lot of sense. I accept the digital age is what we live in but we don't need to further pollute poor old Mother Earth just so we can play Angry Birds on our hand-helds.