Since the discovery of the Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997, which is predicted to measure twice the size of Texas, five more have been found across the world’s oceans with the Atlantic gyre predicted to be even larger. This plastic takes thousands of years to degrade, remaining in the environment to be broken up into ever smaller fragments by ocean currents.
The gyre stretches from the coastlines of California to the shores of Japan. Recent studies have estimated 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world’s oceans. The number of plastic pieces in the Pacific Ocean has tripled in the last ten years and the size of the accumulation is set to double in the next ten.
Sea Chair is made entirely from plastic recovered from our oceans. The film uses a fishing boat and an open source design for the collection and creation of a marine plastic stool.
In the “Practice of Everyday Life” Michel de Certeau investigates the ways in which users-commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules-operate. He asserts:
“This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, “ways of operating” or doing things, no longer appear as merely obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them.”
“ReFunct Media” is a series of multimedia installations that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). Those devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.
Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.
625 discarded remote controls, repurposed to broadcast live television using the infrared LEDs inside each device. Creating an infrared display invisible to the naked eye. When viewed through infrared goggles, the light becomes visible and the low resolution TV broadcast can be seen.
Gassy outbursts from a suborbital rocket may be the cleanest way to get rid of hazardous space debris, suggests a new US patent application filed on 27 September by aerospace giant Boeing of Chicago.
Space junk – derelict rocket bodies, broken or used-up satellites and debris generated by their endless collisions – is becoming the scourge of the space age. Even tiny pieces can zip through metal at hypersonic speed, putting astronauts and spacecraft at risk.
After more than 50 years of space flight, so much litter has accumulated that some experts predict near-Earth space will become difficult to navigate by mid-century unless agencies start removing the mess.
Most space junk can burn up safely during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, but that means something needs to nudge it out of orbit. The trick is, how do you deliver an orbital clean-up crew without adding more rubbish?
So far, ideas for sweeping up near-Earth space include attaching sails to derelict satellites to slow them down, sending tentacled janitor robots to drag junk out of orbit or deploying enormous robot-pulled nets to trawl for debris.
One problem with nets, sails and janitor bots is that they need lofting on orbital rockets that themselves could leave behind space litter.
Boeing’s plan suggests sending up a rocket carrying a tank of a cryogenic inert gas such as xenon or krypton. At the top of a trajectory designed to intercept a swarm of space junk, the rocket would vaporise its payload and “fire” up to 10 tonnes of gas through a special nozzle.
This cloud would dissipate in seconds, but its initial density would create enough drag to slow the debris, Boeing inventor Michael Dunn says in the patent.
Dunn has calculated that for an object moving at about 7.8 kilometres per second, the gas cloud could reduce orbital velocity by 0.2 kilometres per second – enough to condemn it to fiery incandescence in the upper atmosphere.
This rocket may best be used below the 100-kilometre Karman line, which by convention defines the edge of space. At that height, the rocket could shoot its debris-braking cloud much further – up to altitudes of 600 kilometres – and then simply drop back to Earth.
Apple has pulled its products off the U.S. government-backed registration of environmentally friendly electronics.
Apple asked EPEAT, the electronics standards setting group, to pull its 39 certified desktop computers, monitors and laptops, which included past versions of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, off the list of green products late last month, Robert Frisbee, CEO of EPEAT told CIO Journal. EPEAT, created through funding by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and manufacturers, awards products a seal to certify they are recyclable and designed to maximize energy efficiency and minimize environmental harm.
In order to meet the standards, recyclers need to be able to easily disassemble products, with common tools, to separate toxic components, like batteries. The standards were created jointly by manufacturers, including Apple, advocacy groups and government agencies. Frisbee says an Apple staff member told him at the end of June that the company no longer wanted Apple computers to be listed as EPEAT certified.
“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.”
The news complicates the work of CIOs at educational institutions where Apple has a strong presence. Schools often push IT departments to make environmentally sound electronics purchases, as do an increasing number of corporations. But now even older models of Apple equipment are no longer certified.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment, but referred to Apple’s website which contains reports on the environmental impact of its products. Apple offers several recycling programs through its stores and website.
One of Apple’s newest products, the MacBook Pro with a high-resolution “Retina” display, was nearly impossible to fully disassemble, said Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit.com, a website that provides directions for users to repair their own machines. The battery was glued to the case, and the glass display was glued to its back. The product, released just a month ago, had not been submitted for EPEAT certification, according to the organization.
Frisbee said that the structure of that laptop would have made it ineligible for certification. “If the battery is glued to the case it means you can’t recycle the case and you can’t recycle the battery,” Frisbee said.
Apple was putting design first in an effort to make products smaller and have batteries last longer, said Shaw Wu an analyst at Sterne Agee. “They are not trying to purposely make it hard to open, they are just trying to pack as much as they can into a small space–it’s a design decision,” Wu said.
Many corporations like Ford, HSBC, and Kaiser Permanente require their CIOs to purchase computers from sources that are EPEAT certified, said Sarah O’Brien director of outreach for EPEAT. And the U.S. government requires that 95% of the electronics it purchases be EPEAT certified.
In 2010, the last year the survey was conducted, 222 out of the 300 American universities with the largest endowments asked their IT departments to give preference to EPEAT certified computers. Around 70 of the schools required EPEAT certification for electronics purchases, according to O’Brien.
But though Apple still gets 10%-15% of its revenue from educational organizations, according to Wu, an increasing part of its product mix is made up of iPhones and iPads, which are not currently certifiable under EPEAT.
Wu said he believes Apple will likely soon create an alternate standard for its own products. But in the meantime he believes companies are likely to still buy the products.
“At the end of the day in a business it’s really about what works,” Wu said.
Wi-Fi Router Hacking: E-waste Workshop 11.0 Schedule: Friday 29 and Saturday 30 of June, from 10am – 4pm (2 days) Teachers:Benjamin Gaulon and Lourens Rozema Group: Max 10 people
Participation: free
Required Skills: No previous background in programming or electronics required
Required Materials: Bring your own laptop + some e-waste (old printer, scanner, old home phone, electronic toy, obsolete audio / video equipment…)
Location: Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin
During openhere the e-waste workshop will focus on hacking and interconnecting obsolete devices by repurposing cheap WiFi routers. Our workshops offer participants a chance to become familiar with basic hardware and software design, while at the same time gaining hands-on experience making an interactive art project. The workshops are open to participants of different backgrounds, and no programming or electronic skills are required. The idea is to start from scratch and create a complete project by the end of the workshop, including concept, design, electronics / interfacing, and functional programming.
Deconstructing readily-available, cheap electronic devices into interactive tools is more than a lot of fun; the process offers the same visible, hands-on learning and understanding acquired through dissection. By re-purposing second-hand hardware or cheap toys, a commercial, mass-produced product is transformed into a unique device, with potential for new and original means of expression or communication. The boundaries of a device are set by the manufacturer (planned obsolescence); those limits can be redefined by such creative recycling.
We live in a disposable society. This is most prevalent in large parts of the telecommunications industry. Mobile phones, communication devices, game consoles and PCs have short lifespans. Consumers expect ever-greater functionality from the next generation of each device. Moore’s Law dictates that the complexity of computer chips doubles every 18 months. This causes a rapid decrease in the value of existing electronics. Thus, the dark side of technological progress is the production of endless amounts of electronic waste: e-waste. Although the economic value of obsolete electronics approaches zero, the electronic components themselves can still be useful in other contexts. Hence we need to seek ideas and inspiration for how we can rethink technology and, in particular, communications and ICTs, from sources that are outside traditional engineering domains.
The European Parliament on Thursday approved plans to force large electronic retailers to take back old equipment.
The new rules are as part of a shakeup of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive and will gradually come into force over the next seven years.
Only one third of electrical and electronic waste in the European Union is separately collected and appropriately treated and the revised directive will increase the collection target from its current 4 kilograms per capita to around 20 kilograms per capita by 2020. By 2020, it is estimated that the volume of electronic equipment will increase to 12 million tons and the E.U. authorities want to see 85 percent of that collected and treated.
The retailer take-back plan means that larger electrical goods stores, with a shop space of 400 square meters or larger, will have to accept small electronic items, such as mobile phones, free of charge, without making users purchase a new product.
Welcoming Thursday’s vote, E.U. Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik said: “Proper treatment of WEEE is important to prevent harm to human health and the environment, and its systematic collection is the precondition for professional recycling of the valuable raw materials like gold, silver, copper and rare metals, contained in our used TVs, laptops and mobile phones.”
The revised directive also includes a clampdown on illegal exports of waste electronic equipment. Equipment that is no longer under warranty can only be exported to non-OECD countries if it has been certified to be fully functional and sent properly.
“It is long overdue that we stop making developing countries the dumping ground for our hazardous waste,” said Green member of the European Parliament, Michalis Tremopoulos.
In the “Practice of Everyday Life” Michel de Certeau investigates the ways in which users-commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules-operate. He asserts:
“This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, “ways of operating” or doing things, no longer appear as merely obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them.”
“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). Those devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.
Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.
BusinessGreen reports that UK startup WEEE Systems has ambitious plans for addressing the e-wasteproblem and moving the electronics industry toward a closed-loop system. It plans to involve at least one manufacturer in developing a prototype plant that ultimately would see manufacturers taking responsibility for the full life-cycle of their products by helping companies reuse and recycle more, and more efficiently.
BusinessGreen quotes Bob Clarke, WEEE Systems chief executive, who explains the basic idea behind the company:
“The e-waste industry is bizarre in that firms currently pay you less than the old kit is worth to take it away and recycle it, but then if anything goes wrong and it does end up in an illegal scrap yard in the developing world you are the one that gets in trouble. We want to work with a manufacturer where they agree to give us 50,000 old TVs; for example, we’ll reuse or recycle them as appropriate and provide our partner with the resulting reusable parts and materials.”
WEEE Systems says it’s trying to help the industry look beyond the minimum legal requirements:
WEEE Systems believes that leading businesses will want to look beyond legislative compliance and embrace changes today in order to realise the tangible benefits available – including releasing the real estate tied up storing surplus equipment, protecting brand value and meeting corporate social responsibility objectives.
With raw material prices increasing, there is a growing demand for the value that can be obtained from re-used and recycled materials, further incentivising progressive businesses to take advantage of the material transformation opportunities available.
The BusinessGreen story says the company recently launched a new software package and service to do just that:
Dubbed Cosvcon – an amalgam of cost versus contribution – the new software and service package audits a corporation’s IT infrastructure, recording information on a wide range of metrics, including the equipment’s age, energy use, utilisation and carbon footprint.
The company then provides clients with regular updates on the status of their infrastructure and identifies the optimum time to retire old servers, PCs, phones and other equipment.
“The aim is to help the client realise the maximum transformative value of their IT, where we can say, ‘At this point the asset is perfect for the secondary market, but if you leave it for a year it will be good for the recycling market’,” Clarke explained.
Steve Parker/CC BY 1.0 Estimating the amount of energy the Internet uses is no small task. We have to take into account everything — from the embodied energy of Internet-connected devices like smart phones, laptops, e-readers, desktops, cables and wires and of course the servers themselves, as well as the energy consumption of the servers and devices and more. It’s a huge task, but two researchers from University of California, Berkeley, Justin Ma and Barath Raghavan, came …Read the full story on TreeHugger
In the “Practice of Everyday Life” Michel de Certeau investigates the ways in which users-commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules-operate. He asserts:
“This goal will be achieved if everyday practices, “ways of operating” or doing things, no longer appear as merely obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them.”
“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). Those devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.
Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.
Try as we might, even the most well-protected hardware can’t stay new forever. Coca-Cola spills and accidental drops are ever-present possibilities, of course, but there’s little you can do to stop the inevitable march of time.
However, some hardware ages better than others. It’s the reason why your friend’s Super Nintendo looks fresh and unscathed, while your own console sits forlornly in a corner, tinted yellow to the core. “Cigarette smoke!” some will holler, convinced that’s the reason, but the actual explanation might surprise you.
There are many different types of plastic, but the kind most commonly found in old computer hardware is called ABS, or acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. In its pure form, ABS plastic is combustible, however, and not the sort of thing you want in a mass-market consumer product. Thus, plastic manufacturers mix in a variety of flame retardant chemicals — usually involving large amounts of bromine, a naturally brown liquid — to help reduce a product’s chance of catching fire.
The problem is that bromine undergoes a reaction when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) radiation — in other words, most sources of light, both natural and artificial. This breaks the bonds that were created during the manufacturing process, and leaves bromine molecules free to seek out oxygen. This process, also known as oxidation, is responsible for the increasingly brown or yellow appearance of old plastics over time. Nothing — not even the original packaging — can stop it, and added heat and UV light can actually accelerate the rate of discoloration.
If you were to chip away a small portion of an affected case, you could see this process in action. The inside layer of plastic often retains its original color because it has been exposed to little or no oxidation.
Of course, this doesn’t explain why some Super Nintendo consoles age differently than others. Or why only certain sections of a console or computer take on a discolored hue than the rest. Benj Edwards of Vintage Computing, however, offers a very feasible hypothesis:
Perhaps in one of the production runs of plastic, they didn’t get the catalyst or flame retardant mixture quite right and more residues were left over in the top half’s plastic batch, thus causing it to degrade more rapidly over time. And by the time Nintendo produced the later runs of Super Nintendos, they had probably fixed the problems in the manufacturing process of their plastic, meaning that those later models aren’t as susceptible to oxidation as the earlier models are.
Simply put, Nintendo could have used a more stable plastic that would have been less susceptible to discoloration, but chose ABS plastic for its manufacturing simplicity and reduced cost.
What can you do about it?
As you’ve probably gathered by now, not much. There’s simply no way to reverse the chemical reaction that’s taking place. However, there are ways to compensate, and in some cases, restore a plastic to its original color — at least temporarily.
Perhaps the most obvious solution is to use some sort of abrasive material to get past the discoloration. Light products, such as a Magic Eraser, are good for surface dirt, but can only remove so much. A more radical approach would be to use some light-grain sandpaper. But be wary: in both cases, you’re literally removing layers of plastic with each rub — layers you can never get back.
From the Retr0bright Wiki, the shell of a Commodore 64, after being partially immersed in liquid for eight hours.
A more recent and potentially successful approach is to use a high-concentration solution of hydrogen peroxide, mixed with other household chemicals. This is actually quite dangerous — there’s a risk of burns and blindness here folks — and should only be completed with the utmost care. However, if you’re interested, check out the Retr0bright wiki, which offers a number of tried and tested cleaning recipes that, in some cases, can restore old yellowed cases to an almost-new looking condition.
There are potential side-effects, of course, such as fading logos and labels, but the restoration benefits might be worth it for some.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to ensure that cigarette smoke isn’t the real source of your yellowing woes first, especially if your computer or console was bought second hand. Nicotine won’t penetrate any deeper than the surface of the console, and can be removed relatively easily with a light abrasive material or cleaner.
One of these things doesn’t belong. Image via Flickr user Redbeard Math Pirate.
In conclusion, the next time you feel the urge to fret about your old, yellowing electronics, worry not — the blame for this particular problem rests squarely on the shoulders of someone *other* than you.
Using e-waste as raw material, our workshops offer participants to become familiar with basic hardware and software hacking / recycling while at the same time gaining hands-on experience making an interactive art project.
