Britons dump 12.5 million perfectly usable computers in landfills every year, according to new research.
The report, commissioned by Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC), claims that one in four old machines in the UK are being dumped with the household rubbish or at tips, rather than being recycled.

Of those computers that are being recycled, just 10% are actually being recycled via a manufacturer’s recycling facility, with the majority (41%) being given to friends or charity.

The figures are particularly astounding given the existence of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, which requires manufacturers of electrical equipment to collect and recycle their products for free when requested by the consumer.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers claims that not enough is being done to promote the WEEE Directive and is calling on local councils to set up dedicated recycling facilities for electrical computers at local tips.

“Although people do take their rubbish to the local tip, unless their laptop or PC is assessed on the site, there’s no guarantee that it will be passed on for re-use or recycling,” says Dave Pritchard, senior technology strategist, Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

“It’s a huge missed opportunity. With the right facilities these thrown away units could easily be reused elsewhere and those facilities need to be at the municipal sites where people drop off their waste.”

Source – PC Pro

Two million e-mails are sent every second in the UK. That is almost three billion each day. But what is the real cost of this information overload?

We can spend up to half our working day going through our inbox, leaving us tired, frustrated and unproductive.

A recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress.

And it is expensive, too. One FTSE firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year.

Now firms are being forced to help staff deal with the daily avalanche in their inboxes. Some hire e-mail consultants, while others are experimenting with e-mail free days.

Ray Tomlinson is not a household name, but perhaps he should be. Ray was responsible for the e-mail revolution.

In 1971, he developed the code that enabled him to send an e-mail between two computers for the first time.

He says: “I do feel proud of this accomplishment. In some sense it was such a simple thing to do at the time, but it has had ramifications through many people’s lives. What I didn’t anticipate is how fast it would grow once it started growing.”

Ray’s aim was to make it possible to communicate between computers.

“At the time, it was possible to send messages to other users on the same computer, and because these computers were expensive they had many, many users, typically in the hundreds,” he says.

“And so you could send it to a user on the same computer but not on a computer elsewhere.”

His creation was a short, 200-line programme, to which he added the @ symbol.

Spam is a problem… there just seems to be an endless stream of it

“The @ sign was an obvious choice to me anyway, because what I was looking for was a character that I could put between the name, or the login name of a person, and the name of the computer that he was on.

“The @ sign, at least in English, means ‘at’. It’s a preposition, it designates where this person is in some sense, and so it was kind of an obvious choice.”

Electronic mail was born. Businesses immediately realised the potential of this paperless, near-instant form of communication.

And changing the way we communicate changed the way we worked.

This technology also has its downside. It’s too easy to write an e-mail and hit the send button.

Is e-mail the appropriate tool for collaborative working?

Open University: E-mail ‘a square peg in a round hole’

And when an e-mail goes wrong, it can be around the world in 80 seconds and headline news the next day.

On average, we spend 52 hours a year just dealing with our junk mail.

That’s not something that Ray Tomlinson anticipated. “Spam is a problem,” he admits.

“Some people unfortunately have been hit with a form of spam in which there just seems to be an endless stream of it coming in – and that is unfortunate.”

Cutting down

Professor Cary Cooper advises the government on stress in the workplace. Britons take 14 million sick days due to stress every year. He believes e-mail is a major source of employee anxiety.

“E-mail inboxes are causing employees concern, because of the number of e-mails and the poorly written e-mails. They really want to find some sort of solutions for these problems,” he says.

“We are 24/7, we are interfaced by the mobile phone, by Blackberrys, by e-mails, by a whole range of technologies, so that we are almost on call all the time.

It can be hard to keep your e-mails under control

“For me, e-mail is one of the most pernicious stressers of our time.”

City accountancy firm Deloitte found its employees had a problem with e-mail overload.

So it came up with a radical solution.

“A lot of people complain they get too much e-mail, that they’re swamped with it, a lot of the messages they receive are unwanted, unnecessary targeted to the wrong people,” says Mary Hensher, who heads Deloitte’s IT department.

“We all tried to see if we could avoid sending internal e-mail on a Wednesday. Now the first thing that happened was it got everybody talking.

“Everybody started to think about what they were sending, who they were sending it to and whether they could use another method of sending the e-mail. So it had a very good immediate response, where people were actually thinking more about what they were doing.”

E-mail is so ingrained in our working lives that Deloitte’s experiment was abandoned after only a month. But the company still thinks it was worth it.

“So although the e-mail free day is not an e-mail free day any more, the actual amount of internal email circulating has dropped, because people are more conscious of what they’re sending,” Ms Hensher says.

Top tips

One man that might have the answer to all the problems surrounding e-mail is Loughborough University’s Dr Tom Jackson.

He has spent the last nine years researching and developing better e-mail practice and has five tips he believes can help you take control of your inbox:

Beware of the junk e-mailers and their devious tricks

Invest in a spam filter. You shouldn’t open a spam e-mail, because as soon as you open the e-mail up, it notifies the organisation that has sent that, saying this is a valid e-mail address. They know how long you’ve looked at it, when you looked at it and did you go back to it.

Target your e-mail. One of most annoying things about e-mail is the sheer number of messages we receive that aren’t addressed primarily to us. Does everyone in the cc box really need to be copied in on your words of wisdom? Basically, a cc is there for information purposes only, and you should only use it for that purpose.

Write more carefully. The reason to write carefully is crystal clear. It just vastly increases the chance that whatever it is you want to get done will get done. If you don’t write carefully, there’s room for misunderstanding.

Reduce interruptions. I think it does start to stress people out. Simply by changing the way they have their e-mail application set up, they can start to reduce some of that stress.

Get training. E-mail seems like common sense. Anyone can write an e-mail. But the issues we’re having are that many people are struggling with e-mail communication – and training can really help with that.

The majority of employers permit employees to have reasonable personal use of the Internet during working hours. Employers have sought to minimise the risks that this personal use might present by introducing Acceptable Use Policies (“AUP’s”) and monitoring employee use. This bargain between employers and employees is now being tested by the phenomenon of online social networking, in which the popularity of sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace poses a new question for employers; do we trust our employees and allow unrestricted access to such sites, or do we perceive the danger as too great and ban the sites?
This article considers how relevant UK legislation and employers’ policies impact on the use of social networking sites, highlights some of the problem areas that cause employers most concern and provides guidance on how employers can take practical steps to avert the dangers involved.
The Online Social Networking Phenomenon IT and HR managers will be well used to the challenges that come with regulating employees’ personal use of the Internet while at work. Having a clear AUP, enforcing it with technical solutions, notifying employees of clear rules on what is acceptable and what is not, balancing the need to monitor with the employees’ reasonable expectations of privacy and weighing the overall benefits of allowing personal usage against the risks of doing so, are all issues with which managers will be familiar.

To some extent, online social networking is still just one example of employees using an employer’s PC to access a website for personal use; all of the above issues apply. However, this particular type of employee use brings a new, sharper edge to these issues and has often meant that employers who would generally encourage a liberal approach to personal use have drawn the line at social networking sites and imposed a ban.
Online social networking presents specific problems because of the nature of the content on such sites. Would an employer normally ask an employee to explain comments made to a friend during a conversation in a pub on a Saturday night? Hardly, and yet such comments made online to the same friend might be monitored by the employer. When recruiting, an employer is unlikely to telephone a candidate’s friend to get more of an understanding of what actually happened on the candidate’s stag do, and yet it is known that some employers have used sites such a Facebook to check on the online “personality” of potential job applicants. While employers have to tread carefully because of the very personal nature of the information accessed and distributed via these sites, it is understandable that many employers feel the need to monitor employees’ usage. Social networking sites can be both addictive and time-consuming, damaging employee productivity. Employers may be identified and there is always the possibility of derogatory comments or disclosure of commercially sensitive information being made by an employee, which then becomes a permanent feature online. In the light of these risks, it is hardly surprising that recent surveys suggest at least 43% of employers have banned employees from social networking sites for productivity and security reasons. The electrical retailer, Comet, which normally operates what it describes as a “culture of trust” within the company, has taken the decision to ban staff access to Facebook. It described this as an unusual step, but felt that it had to be explicit about the behaviour to be expected from staff.
Social Networking and the Law The same legal principles apply to the use of online social networking as apply to all employee use of the Internet. Employers therefore need to consider the Data Protection Act 1998 (‘DPA’) and particularly the guidance given by the Information Commissioner in Part 3 of The Employment Practices Data Protection Code (“the Code”), which deals with monitoring at work. Under the Code, employees are entitled to a degree of privacy at work and employers should only monitor in a proportionate way, having first considered which is the least intrusive method of monitoring to achieve the objective required. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (‘RIPA’) and the Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000 employers are permitted to monitor or record communications without express employee consent in certain circumstances. Such instances include investigating or detecting unauthorised use of the employer’s telecommunications system, establishing the existence of facts or ensuring quality control. In order to undertake such monitoring lawfully, the employer must have taken all reasonable steps to inform the employees concerned that monitoring may take place; this is usually made clear in the AUP. While the Human Rights Act 1998 (‘HRA’) only has direct effect against public authorities (such as councils and NHS Trusts) it may be cited by private sector employees as an additional claim should they seek to argue, for example, breach of contract or unfair dismissal. Article 8 of the HRA provides that everyone has the right to respect for private and family life. This is not an absolute right and will always be balanced against the reasonable needs of the business.

Productivity and Damage to Brand

One of the biggest concerns regarding employees’ use of online social networking is simply poor productivity; that employees may spend an excessive amount of work time on these sites. However, if this were the only concern, it could be addressed by only permitting access during certain times (e.g. lunch and break times) or alternatively setting a particular amount of time that would be acceptable usage. A more troublesome concern is the potential for damage to an employer’s reputation or brand, if an employee makes derogatory comments about an employer, client or customer. Such comments then become easy to find via an online search and may be available for an unlimited time.
Employers are also concerned about the potential loss of confidential information by an unguarded (or malicious) comment by an employee, then causing the company embarrassment, financial damage or possibly leaving them open to security risks
such as identity fraud.
For employers, the temptation to utilise sites such as Facebook and MySpace may also lead them into trouble. Some employers view the scanning of such sites for information on prospective employees as legitimate; others view it as distasteful and intrusive (the equivalent of rummaging through a candidate’s personal items). Whatever the view, employers adopting this approach would do well to heed the warning of the TUC’s guidance on online social networking. This guidance reminds employers that only a minority of potential staff will have a public profile on a social network, so using information from this source can give either an unfair advantage or disadvantage to certain candidates, as well as leaving the employer open to the accusation of discrimination.

Source – The Register co Message Labs