Software firms 'behind waste PC hazard'

SOFTWARE companies must do more to prevent billions of PCs being needlessly thrown away, risking damage to the environment, a university professor has warned.

Peter Swann, professor of industrial economics at the University of Nottingham, said "software bloating" was leading to the need for people to scrap their computers regularly, creating mountains of "e-waste".

He said the pressure to upgrade computers could mean up to 2.5 billion PCs would have been thrown away by 2013.

He said: "Although computers look very beautiful, clean things, they do in fact have quite a lot of toxic material in them. Our university has a policy that about every four years they upgrade our computers.

"The computers still work but they can't run the software that is out now."