I sat in front of a computer monitor for two hours as part of my appointment. It took me a moment to multiply the monitor in front of my by the total number in the hospital and figure out how wasteful cathode ray tubes (CRTs) really are.
Why are CRTs still being used? I mean, isn’t this 60-year-old technology? LCDs blow them away in almost every respect and we’re still using these huge, heavy boxes for displays.
When I was at my trade show last week, I stared into the beautiful image from a leased HP flat-screen LCD. I stopped for a moment to marvel at the crispness of the image: it was so clear it was amazing. No CRT can compare.
CRTs are big, heavy, hot, prone to failure, suck up outrageous amounts of electricity, and once they’re spent, they drip toxic materials into landfills for decades.
When a CRT is finished, you can’t pay someone to take it from you. The state surplus office is a good example of this. On any given day, you can find bins full of monitors for sale at $5 apiece. No one touches them. Piled on the pavement outside is a pile of 30 old CRTs, relics which are only fit to be buried in a landfill, where they’ll slowly leak their mercury and lead into the groundwater.
At one point, the argument was that LCDs were too expensive, but the gap between the two has lessened significantly. The extra you might pay for an LCD over a CRT could quickly be made up in electricity and cooling costs. Not to mention having a much longer lifetime than a CRT.
The FCC’s decision to make the nation’s older televisions obsolete will have disastrous effects on our groundwater. We need to make sure there are appropriate measures in place so that these dangerous materials are handled properly.
I’m happy to see the CRT go the way of the dinosaur, but only so far: they should be extinct but not buried.
