E-Waste

Saving E-Textiles from an E-waste Fate

Dec 14: Also posted at The Hacktory.

E-waste sucks. In the US we trash about 400 million electronic devices every year. A study published this summer says that soft circuits and e-textiles are on track to become an even more intractable waste problem, unless early adopters turn it into a green technology.

An article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology from August discusses how the very thing that makes e-textiles interesting–the unobtrusive integration of electronics and fabric–could make them an e-waste nightmare.

What makes traditional e-waste so difficult is that it contains valuable stuff like precious metals and rare earths, but in small quantities that are hard to recycle and laced with toxins.

Enter e-textiles. Who isn’t charmed by the idea of a biking sweatshirt with built-in turn signals or accessories that could let your doctor know if your heart rate goes wacky? Not only that, but soft circuits … Read the rest

E-waste talk at Penn today

Today I’ll be presenting about e-waste on the Penn campus for my former department.Â Penn folks are invited, but I don’t think it’s open to the public just because of space considerations. As usual, I’ll be talking about how e-waste came to be such a problem and why recycling is not simply the environmentally just thing to do, but also a smart hedge against volatile commodities markets.Â I’ll be making the argument that any country that wants to be a serious player in tech manufacturing ought to work on making new electronics out of old electronics.

I’ve done a little bit of reading to catch myself up on the changes in the rare earth market and e-waste landscape since I finished my capstone project.Â I found that the rare earth shortage I wrote about has lead manufacturers to find ways to use less of them in the past six months, … Read the rest

Tech Culture

Area Treehugger Speaks at German Hacker Conference

Updated with concise list of links, 10/12/2011.

I recently got home from 9 days in and around Berlin for the Chaos Communication Camp, organized by the Chaos Computer Club.Â The Camp happens every 4 years and on a lark I submitted 2 talk proposals.Â To my happy bewilderment, both were accepted.Â I gave “There’s Gold In Them Circuit Boards:Â Why E-Waste Recycling is Smart and How to Make it Smarter” based on my thesis work on e-waste, and “Data Mining Your City:Â Early Lessons in Open City Data from Philadelphia, USA”.Â On the train from Berlin to the airfield where the camp took place, I met Florian Stoller who helped me give the city data talk.Â Besides being on the board of his local Pirate Party in Fribourg, Switzerland, he also helps run Be-Cause , a company that makes e-gov forms.Â He filled in the European perspective, … Read the rest

Environmental Studies

E-waste Talk from The Next HOPE

In July, 2010 I presented a talk on my thesis topic, electronic waste, at the Hackers On Planet Earth, or HOPE conference in NYC.Â My main interests around the topic are environmental justice, externalized costs, and transboundary movement of commodities. Sounds a little dry, but it’s plenty juicy. Here’s a link to the presentation.
Electronic Waste: What’s Here and What’s Next.… Read the rest