Written by Reduce campus e-waste initiative
Reduce, reuse, recycle is not just a neutral statement, it is a hierarchy of priorities, ranking, reducing waste“ the highest, and recycling the lowest. Thus whenever possible, the goal of any sustainability policy should be to reduce and reuse, instead of recycling.
This club aims to contribute to campus sustainability by drastically reducing the amount of e-waste that goes to recycling (and most likely ends up in a landfill in Ghana), by instead disassembling old PCs, notebooks and other hardware to harvest precious parts and turn them to new use. Potential uses that can be envisioned include network drives and media centers. Each could then be offered to labs and individuals free of charge. Naturally we would require input “material”, as such we would request that any hardware thrown away on campus be first offered to us so we can harvest useful parts.
We expect that we could reduce e-waste by up to 90%, depending on hardware meant for trash.