New U.K. study suggests software innovation to blame for escalating e-waste problem

An essay/study has been released by the Nottingham University Business School in the United Kingdom that suggests "software bloat" is a big culprit for the escalating problem of electronic waste.

The timing of the report is particularly interesting, given the pent-up PC upgrade cycle associated with the Windows 7 release. Microsoft itself has said that something like 86 percent of businesses are running Windows XP or earlier versions of Windows. IDC has predicted 177 million shipments by the end of this year. The Nottingham researchers, led by Professor Peter Swan, who is an expert in innovation and sustainability, write that the pressure to upgrade and the new hardware necessary to do so force the needless junking of something like 2.5 billion PCs by 2013. The study, called "Software Marketing and e-Waste: Standards for Sustainability," suggests that software designers should get better about working within the memory and design constraints of existing hardware and avoiding "featuritis," the use of memory-sapping features.