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Control-Alt-Recycle
klevin writes "Grist magazine's running an article on what to look for when the old PC's running out of gas and you want to avoid trashing the environment even further. Their suggestions include: upgrade instead of replacing, go for LCD monitors instead of CRTs and, if replacing, reuse the old one as an MP3 server on your home network."
...right here.
Or, if you're on the other end, you can also apply for a used computer.
The Army reading list
Of course, then there is always the issue of older machines being less power efficient; Perhaps reusing them could be considered not green at all :)
... send your old computers to me, I wouldn't mind having something to hack around on, I could install Linux/BSD(not dying!) and the people would rejoice!
turn them into smoothwalls for your friends and neighbors.
Seriously... I've recycled a bunch of old pentium-class machines that were headed for the landfill by setting up a "smoothie" and giving them away to ppl.
Doing my part to stamp out worms and viruses.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
A few years back (sorry, can't find the link) UPS had an offer going. Send them $30, and they send you a prepaid shipping label. You put all the crap you don't want into a box, slap on the shipping label, and UPS takes care of properly recycling and parting out your old crap. A good, cheap way to clean all that antique hardware out of your basement and do it properly.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Computer re-use is the best option. Use 'em until they can't even pull firewalling duty.
...letting it go. Stop buying new CRTs now, folks.
The big culprits, however, are CRTs. Manufacturing those things is awful. My father's company once contracted with (Sony, I think) a Singapore manufacturer to remove and purify all the water from their industrial runoff from CRT manufacturing. Dad's company had been working on an ultrapure water system for the Shuttle, so they knew they could do it. However, the final product (a sludge) was so toxic that it would have cost more to dispose of than just diluting the wastewater and
I've wiped disks clean, installed new distros and open office, tweaked it to avoid glitches and then donated the resultant computers to a local homeless shelter. They use them as typewriters for the most part.
I hate to see perfectly good equipment go to waste. (Especially just because I wanted the latest and greatest!)
Keeping old machines in service is fine, but I'm not so sure about finding new uses for them for the sake of not switching them off..
On a similar note, new PC purchases. The library at my Uni has got a whole bunch of new Pentium 4s with WinXP in the library, for running a web client for searching through book records... nearby, the bank of ~20 monocrhome Wyse text-mode dumb terminals are still ticking away after something like 15 years? Meanwhile I'm running simulations on sub-800MHz PIIIs in the labs!
Ahh bureaucracy...
- Paul
But there must be some space out there for sites specialising in hardware re-use.....maybe offering e-stores for hard to get parts or "adapters".
Links anybody :-)
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
LCDs are harder on the eyes than an available CRT counterpart. This is true of even the best LCDs.
Also in my experience they are more fragile (owing possibly to their smaller size and weight) and prone to failure than CRTs. If you have to replace an LCD 3 times over a 6-year period vs a CRT's never, is it really a better choice for the environment to go with LCDs?
I have an old Dimension 166 running in my garage, it's currently acting as the mp3/ogg player, and internet radio streamer. I'm planning on getting a larger hardrive for it and make it backup all boxes on the network each night. It's running a Netgear wireless card too, so no wiring was needed.
The constant utility uses of Linux never cease to amaze me.
CVB
free ipod and free gmail!
True it might be better to use a LCD. But I have saved a lot money as of lately by acquiring CRTs that would have been trashed.
For instance, my company did some downsizing in the past few years. This means they had extra CRTs that they were going to trash. I took some home.
Isn't it better that I use used CRTs that still have life rather than buying a new LCD?
Here is something I've wondered for a while now. I have a fileserver on my network that I use for housing MP3s. When I want to listen to them, I just point my player at the files over the network.
.wavs ripped from CD.
This can be problematic if I'm doing other network intensive stuff clogging the pipe.. or listening to raw
Is there MP3 server software with a client that supports streaming with cache or something similar to whats used over the web to even out the hiccups?
Recycling old computer equipment here at the mission is a huge problem. We have a growing pile of old monitors and other computer equipment. This stuff comes to us through donations to our thrift store.
Unfortunately, most of the computer equipment that comes to us is useless. We don't sell it through our thrift store: we've found that no matter what we say, people expect technical support after buying a computer. For the most part we don't use the computers ourselves. We could start declining donations of computer equipment, but even that can be difficult to enforce... stuff has a way of slipping in anyway.
So for the time being, the equipment, especially the monitors, just keeps piling up. I've worked hard to convince my coworkers that it's wrong to just dump the monitors in the trash. Happily, this is a place where ethical concerns do count.
One idea I've had is to strip out the electronics from all the equipment and ship just the electronics to a recycler. We would trash the plastic cases. The idea is that we would drastically reduce the volume and weight of the material, thereby reducing shipping costs to something that might be profitable. Labor would be free: the addiction recovery program includes working full time at an assignment in the mission, and most of the guys are plenty handy with screwdrivers and other tools.
Has anybody has any experience with something like this? I think I could sell the idea if we even just broke even. Is there any hope for Preprocessing for Fun and Profit (especially profit)?
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
I have purchased a new computer every Spring for the past eight years. I try like hell to donate my old one. It is harder than you think. Most organizations don't want used computers. According to our local school system, "Used computers require so much more manpower to maintain them that it is cheaper to use all new computers." So, instead of going the 'donating' route, I call the local Middle School and ask the principal to give me the name of a student that could really use a computer but can't afford it. Then, I get to have that warm fuzzy feeling when I deliver it to its new owner in person.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
I knew that CRT's made a lot of nasty waste to make them, but as they're basically a TV with a different input signal and higher resolution, do Television sets create the same waste products? People buy a lot of TV's too and while there is a shift toward LCD TVs it isn't as pronounced as in LCD computer screens as they are simply too darned expensive for normal sized TVs.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
... the major vendors made their desktops even easier to upgrade for people. If it was as easy as pop a few snaps, lift out the mobo and reinstall a new one, with the vendor taking back the old one, that might help. Yews, this is most doable for anyone on slashdot, blah blah, but for this typical/mythical "joe user" out there it is too intimidating by far.
It is also a shame it'sso hard to find legacy ram, with all it's randomness in config, and the expense. there are zillions of PCs out there that could be easily used several years longer if they were able to easily find/purchase/install the ram to it's max config, without having to shell out more than what a new lightweight system costs now. I've got a nice roomful of older machines, hardly any of them will run a modern linux with a gui desktop. the processor speed is adequate, it's the ram that makes it difficult. I'm on a 1996 IBM right now (FC1 OS), and it was only possible to make this functional-enough by installing a lot more ram. Yes, you can go online, use various vendors configurators, then get sticker shocked back to reality. And most people out there just don't bother,lack the skills, and it's hard to do for a lot of people, they are forced to upgrade their entire machine almost. This is inefficient to a large degree. I realise that is changing, and again, I am not referring to your typical slashdot reader here, but it's still a pain for most people. I know that the older machines I build to give away to local farm kids get given with older win OS (usually a fresh clean install of whichever was on the machine, usually 95 or 98 obviously) because I can't afford the utterly ridiculous prices that the RAM vendors charge, so I can't put a modern linux GUI system on them. And the prices are ridiculous in the first place BECAUSE the vendors are so freaking cheap, leaving the RAM slots unfilled in the vast bulk of PCs that have shipped over the years.
Perhaps if the (major) vendors only shipped machines with the maximum amount of RAM possible already installed as a universal industry default, this might help, machines would last longer as practical tools. That is as easy as "stroke of the pen, law of the land" action there. And if they all did it, the price ratios would still be the same, albeit higher, but, overall prices have dropped so much from even 10 years ago I don't see this as a problem.
replacing my 3-21 inch CRT's with 3-17 inch lcd's made a huge difference. Also using ITX based motherboards with sane processors (800-1ghs is more than enough for anyone at home using a general use pc) and other devcies will further reduce your power draw..
you pay attention to these things when you generate your own power and switching from the 21 inch crt's to the LCD's cut my power bill in 1/2. (Yes I have solar, no I dont have any batteries, I generate electricity and back feed it to the city grid. at night I use city grid power. cince I run the meter backwards during the day, It's liek a giant battery, and the electrical company get's a free "boost" from my power.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Recycling never takes off until the law says it has to. Until real recycling is a requirement, it just is not profitable enough to build that infrastructure.
Actually, recycling won't take off until it becomes profitable. There was a significant recycling industry before most communities instituted curb side recycling. That recycling industry was almost destroyed by curb side recycling programs that drastically increased the supply of recyclable materials without doing anything to increase the demand for those materials. This is one of the reasons most curb side recycling programs cost their communities money to run; the revenue from selling recyclables is very low because they increased supply without increasing demand.
I found the book "Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage" by William Rathje & Cullen Murphy to be a very interesting analysis of how we deal with out garbage. It also happens to contain a section on recycling.
We have no idiot fees here and NO SALES TAX for anyone, on anything, at anytime. There are several well-stocked and knowledgeable PC stores in Medford just across the border. The trip is about 400 miles each way.
Yes, damn those Californians for trying to make us bear the cost of our actions (buying computers). Better to defer that cost 5 years down the road and refuse to pay for recycling then, too.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
True for your house, yes. But not necessarily for the total amount of energy. If you heat your house with oil, almost all chemical energy in the oil is used to heat the house.
Yeah... if you have an efficient furnace.
I'm currently in Ottawa, Canada - either the coldest or second coldest world capital. I'm renting, 'cause there ain't no way in hell that I plan on living here permanently. And the house I'm renting has a 35-year-old oil furnace.
Estimating its efficiency at 70%, I did some calculations based on my best oil quote. I looked up the BTUs of heat per gallon of heating oil, and compared it to the BTUs of heat per kWh of electricity. Since electricity here was fixed at 4.3 cents/kWh (up to 4.7 cents/kWh as of April 1), it was cheaper to heat by electricity. The situation would have been different if I were using a newer oil or gas furnace.
Remember, all electricity consumed inside the house, in one way or another, heats the house - the exceptions being the small amounts of light, sound and RF energy which escape. My roommates loved it - "Go ahead, leave the lights on, but close the blinds first!"
Therefore, I heated my house with electricity. I'd been planning on running a stack of Pentium-I class machines doing SETI@Home work units - at least the energy gets used for something productive on its way to becoming heat - but didn't have time to build the rack to hold all these machines, nor to duct them into the cold air return on the furnace. So instead I picked up a few $20 ceramic heaters and threw them into a big steel box ducted to the furnace and controlled by the thermostat. My electric bill from January to March was $425 - and that includes heating, lighting, the dryer, etc. - very impressively low!
But if you use electricity (be it through the computer or whatever), it takes much more energy to produce the same amount of (electric) energy, if it's produced in a fossile fuel power plant. A coal plant that only produces electricity has, what, 50% efficiency maximum(?). The rest of the energy is wasted in the process. If the electricity is produced in, say, a hydro plant, that's another storyVery true. Most people who think electric cars are a good idea, simply don't understand anything about electrical generation and distribution systems (like, how many coal and nuclear plants are gonna have to be built when 10,000,000 Los Angeles commuters start plugging in their electric cars every night?). It was even rampant in my electrical engineering courses in university!
In Eastern Ontario, given our proximity to Quebec, I'd assume that most of our energy is imported from their hydroelectric dams. But either way, my rationale is cost. Generally, saving money is the most powerful incentive to cut use of resources.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.