E-day and beyond

Took a whole lot of equipment to the e waste day in Hamilton and was suprised with
a line up of cars queuing to drop off e waste. There were people being sent away who had trailers
of stuff. We had been stock piling crt screens which had been replaced with more energy efficient LCDs. We also had some wireless cards that were no longer compatible with our network.

It was good to see proactive people organising this waste.
We are a small country but we collected
over 900 tonnes of equipment.

“All equipment collected through eDay will be recycled by accredited recyclers who have advised us that over 95% of the materials in a computer can be recovered and re-used. Precious materials such as copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver can all be recovered from e-waste and turned into new products instead of being dumped in landfills,” said Mr Zwimpfer in Wellington.

What still scares me is that some one in China will probably burn off the plastic and inhale
the toxic fumes of disposal, wade in heavy metals etc.

To improve our sustainability we can purchase equipment designed for its end of life
and with less impact in its life.

Envirochips - the low power consumption of the intel atom chipset makes it the sustainability pick for all but higher end video editing tasks.

Three desktop units that may be suitable are

Asus EEEpc desktop








Shuttle x27







Very Pc company








And we need to have a way to recycle these with less burning and looting.