Ants in your PC?
20 April 2010
This week I am going to touch upon a serious issue, prompted by an out of season stocking filler for geeks (of all ages)!
EPD has nailed its flag to the eco-mast for many years, and the continued and growing interest in the e-Legacy awards proves that our readers share the same interests. The rather banal description of ‘going green’ however, lacks any real meaning. Is a green company one that recycles their used printer paper, or takes its coffee jars to the bottle bank? Does the sales team roam the roads in electric cars rather than gallon-guzzlers (bit unrealistic due to limited range, but it may happen)? Is the factory or office set-up to use less energy, or are the products they design and/or make actually developed with an eye on the environmental agenda? The longer the list the more verdant the green credentials.
I had a look at the Envirowise website (the government environmental agency), whose guidance for electronics companies includes the following top tips:
1. Sign up to De-zine Bulletin for quarterly updates from Envirowise on the latest news for your sector
2. Work with your suppliers to ensure that the packaging through your supply chain is recyclable, returnable or re-usable
3. Adopt the life-cycle thinking approach to reduce environmental impact of your product
4. Consider end of life principle – re-use, recycle
5. Encourage your designers, marketers, production managers and senior managers to talk to each other about eco-design improvements, perhaps host your own eco-design workshop to get them all thinking together about short, medium and long term improvements
6. Consider adopting a partnership approach with your suppliers, this will deliver the best cost savings and stimulate free and frank exchange of ideas.
The legislative issues alone could fill volumes (and would need to be updated every six months) and each of the above is more than worthy of discussion in its own right. But for the purposes of this week’s column I am picking up on the 4th Envirowise point as it ties in with a very enjoyable book that came through the post this week. To suggest that this book, ‘62 Projects to make with a Dead Computer’, is an answer to all environmental problems would be more than wildly inaccurate, but it entertained us in the EPD office and a few of us Dad’s are going to take it in turns to take it home.
It does tie in with another of my favourite crusades – engineering in education. It really doesn’t take much to get children thinking like an engineer, all you need to do is to give them a problem or situation that cannot be answered by clicking on ‘OK’ or ‘Cancel’. This book does that. It takes what is effectively junk (of the WEEE variety) and encourages the creative twist that will give it new life. Some of these reincarnations are actually quite demanding, others very straightforward.
One of my first victims will be an old laptop I bought over a decade ago. I’ve never had the heart to throw it out, and at the risk of stimulating stereotyped Scotsman comments, it’s because it cost the then princely sum of £1500 and was state-of-the-art. Its now Babbage-type appearance and performance has rendered it useless (it doesn’t even have a USB port) but under the guidance of this book I like the idea of transforming it into an ant farm. A collective turning in the grave for all the design genius that went into making that computer as it reaches a fairly inglorious end. But maybe that transformation might be a spark to encourage another young person to be creative and think outside the box. In the case of my laptop, I am really hoping to make it into a digital photo frame, but that missing USB port might make that impossible and the ant farm becomes the project of choice.
Other projects include lampshades from keyboards, pencil sharpeners from a mouse, a first aid kit from an iPod… the list goes on. Some require soldering irons and some basic electronics skills, some are more at the ‘sticky backed plastic’ level. Some look quite good (the magnetic memo holder), while others looked pretty rubbish (the ‘scanner’ table was one of several), but I am anticipating half the fun being in taking apart the electronics filled boxes that my children would have otherwise not given a second thought to.
It is clearly not an answer to the massive stockpiles of waste that are ending up in Africa and India; in fact I am sure it is written for those that are interested in doing the projects rather than those grabbed by the save-the-planet bug, but as a bit of harmless fun I would recommend it, whether you have children or not. The website is www.deadcomputerbook.com if you are interested.
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