#tech recycling

[buysellram]

BuySellRam.com is expanding its focus on AI hardware to meet the growing demands of the industry. Specializing in high-performance GPUs, SSDs, and AI accelerators like Nvidia and AMD models, BuySellRam.com offers businesses reliable access to advanced technology while promoting sustainability through the recycling of IT equipment. Read more about how we're supporting AI innovation and reducing e-waste in our latest announcement:

[reasonsforhope]

"As the world grows “smarter” through the adoption of smartphones, smart fridges, and entire smart houses, the carbon cost of that technology grows, too. 

In the last decade, electronic waste has become one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world. 

According to The World Counts, the globe generates about 50 million tons of e-waste every year. That’s the equivalent of 1,000 laptops being trashed every second. 

After they’re shipped off to landfills and incinerated, the trash releases toxic chemicals including lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and so much more, which can cause disastrous health effects on the populations that live near those trash sites. 

Fortunately, Franziska Kerber — a university student at ​​FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria — has dreamed up a solution that helps carve away at that behemoth problem: electronics made out of recyclable, dissolvable paper. 

On September 11, Kerber’s invention “Pape” — or Paper Electronics — earned global recognition when it was named a national winner of the 2024 James Dyson Awards. 

When she entered the scientific competition, Kerber demonstrated her invention with the creation of several small electronics made out of paper materials, including a fully-functional WiFi router and smoke detector. 

“Small electronic devices are especially prone to ending up in household waste due to unclear disposal systems and their small size, so there is significant potential to develop a more user-friendly end-of-life system,” Kerber wrote on the James Dyson Award website. 

“With this in mind, I aimed to move beyond a simple recycling solution to a circular one, ensuring long-term sustainability.” 

Kerber’s invention hinges on crafting a dissolvable and recyclable PCB board out of compressed “paper pulp.” 

A printed circuit board (PCB) is a board that can be found in nearly all modern electronic devices, like phones, tablets, and smartwatches.

But even companies that have started incorporating a “dissolution” step into the end life of their products require deconstruction to break down and recover the PCB board before it can be recycled. 

With Kerber’s PAPE products, users don’t need to take the device apart to recycle it.

“By implementing a user-friendly return option, manufacturers can efficiently dissolve all returned items, potentially reusing electronic components,” Kerber explained. 

“Rapidly advancing technology, which forms the core of many devices, becomes obsolete much faster than the structural elements, which are often made from plastics that can last thousands of years,” Kerber poses. 

PAPE, Kerber says, has a “designed end-of-life system” which anticipates obsolescence. 

“Does anyone want to use a thousand-year-old computer?” Kerber asks. “Of course not. … This ensures a sustainable and reliable system without hindering technological advancement.”"

-via GoodGoodGood, September 13, 2024

[miamaimania]

Upcycled Keyboard Handbag - recycled keys form a textured, tech-inspired fashion statement.

[cxged-bird]

l've been cleaning empty veterinary medicine vaccine vials, and turning them into tiny little trinket potions. They also come in keychain form. I can make almost any color.

They make great fidget toys and my entire team at work loves them.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

A clean break: Scientists convert plastics into soaps and detergents

As an undergraduate student at Zhejiang University in eastern China, Greg Liu went with some of his classmates on a university-sponsored trip to tour a host of chemical industries within the area. The tour gave students pursuing degrees in chemical engineering an opportunity to learn more about the manufacturing and production processes of chemicals within China at the time. Liu realized that day exactly what he wanted to do for a career—find ways to alleviate or stop the industry from polluting the environment. "I realized that this was not going to be the sustainable way of our future. Pollution was everywhere; water, soil, road, you name it. Workers were in unbearable working conditions. I didn't want to be in an environment like that, nor our future generations," Liu said. "That basically drove me to think, 'OK, I must pursue an advanced degree to change the way we work in the chemical industry.'"

Read more.

[ezlo-x]

Question…does the game ever mention the guardians, sheikah shrines, towers, or the divine beasts at all?? Or does the game want me to pretend that it never existed?

[resource-fm]

gifs for big fans of trash

[personal-blog243]

This is also the reason older generations say younger generations don’t know how to fix things!

[novelconcepts]

Honestly, I made that joke about Van’s ancient desktop, but it probably works better than new computers. And it made me think: god, Van must HATE planned obsolescence. Stuff that’s built to die? Stuff that’s built to fall apart in a matter of years just to force you to buy more? For a person whose whole deal is gripping tight to the past, to old technology that still works perfectly fine, to the idea of survival threaded through everything from the stories she tells to the machines she rents out? Yeah, dude. No wonder she hates her cell phone. Not only does it force the illusion of connection without actually granting intimacy, but it’s doomed from the minute you take the thing out of the box. For Van, the very idea has got to be offensive.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Join us for the final interview of this season, as we talk with Michael DeLuca, publisher of Reckoning, a yearly journal of creative writing on environmental justice, and author of The Jaguar Mask. Michael, impressed by the creative uses of cast off technology in the Global South, would like us to also adopt old tech. He recommends that we follow their lead and adapt old tech to suit our needs, as well as find creative new uses for old tech. We should do better than just be passive consumers of the tech that is sold to us more to the needs and convenience of the companies that produce it than to ours.

You can follow Michael via his website (mossyskull.com), Mastodon (@MichaelJDeLuca@climatejustice.social), and Bluesky and X (@michaeljdeluca).

[reasonsforhope]

"It seems like a new Silicon Valley startup could change the face of the battery industry forever by utilizing 3D printers to print solid-state batteries.

Solid-state batteries have advantages over lithium-ion because they aren’t flammable, they’re more easily recycled, work in extreme cold, and have greater energy density.

Solid-state batteries have traditionally been difficult to machine manufacture. But by using 3D printing arrays filled with powder, Sakuu systems can make these batteries not only using 40% less material, but in almost any shape the customer might want.

An electric bike could be powered by a battery that hugs a section of the central chassis, or a smartphone’s battery could run all the way around the frame of a circuit board. These unorthodox shapes are just one of the many advantages that Sakuu believe they can offer.

“Many people have built cells in the lab, but they have not been able to scale,” Sakuu CEO and founder Robert Bagheri told Fast Company. “Our vision started with that scalability in mind.”

The array, known as a Kavian, is much smaller than the traditional, “roll to roll” battery manufacturing methods, and because the powder loaded into the 3D printers can be extremely precise, there’s a 40% reduction in materials usage—a huge cost savings over competitors.

The batteries they print can be charged to 80% in just 15 minutes.

Because they can be printed in any shape, all kinds of clever innovations are possible, in all kinds of industries from e-mobility products to wearables and small devices. The company is even working with an aviation company that wants solid-state batteries for their aircraft with holes through the middle of it to help with heat management."

-via Good News Network, 2/27/23

[iamthepulta]

Making my own post because now capitalism is just revolving in my brain and I want to respond, but I've intruded more than enough. ^^"

I do think capitalism can be solved, and history actually gives me hope because it shows the fundamental need of society. Humans aren't inherently greedy or cruel. The greed and the cruelty are symptoms of a long-standing human need to make things better than they were before: to live comfortably, and without fear.

Capitalism is merely the current expression of this need that we live in.

Solving the need is absolutely possible by establishing a baseline standard of living and resource allotment. And that's comparable to an amount of 'work' that we deem acceptable in our daily lives. Because if you think about it, making coffee every morning with a Keurig gets you a similar product to making coffee every morning with a hand grinder and cold press: one just takes more resources and time than the other.

However, this needs to be flexible because humans are individuals with different needs, and the premise is also questionable because who's setting this baseline anyway?

I personally think it has more to do with government setting a cap on resource imports. (I think it should be stronger than tariffs, personally. Just a hard cap for the year.)

You can't really control demand. That's what most socialists do, and it always fails because humans fundamentally want to make their lives easier. But you can control resource management. If the government says we can only import 20 tons of cotton this year, and we produce 80 tons of cotton, so companies get 100 tons of cotton to do whatever with, and that's it. If we want more cotton, we have to axe some other import.

It 1) makes management visual. 2) gives citizens a personal reason to be invested in their government. 3) will not allocate resources fairly, but will show the true value of a product for the region it's in and prioritize local resources [i.e. if your country does not produce garnets, garnets will be more expensive than gold]. 4) increases jobs since there's far less incentive to outsource work, overall decreasing inequality. 5) encourages a circular economy.

In which case, I suppose I'm for some form of socialist autarky and I think that would solve a decent number of capitalist problems. Companies could no longer overrun workers and there's individual choice behind jobs, work, and some form of style of living.

It IS bad in like- fifty million other ways though. You can't just go from a country used to living in a capitalist society to imposing tariffs and screaming about autarky. Natural resources WILL be destroyed on your own soil and the biggest nation will have the highest quality of living. Imports have to be on a factor of population growth and this might only be possible with nations for a declining population rate. If at all. You also have to add a judicial angle for the people who will inevitably try to take over that system. And, most of all, you have to commit to not going to fucking war over state expansion for resources. Looking at you, Russia.

So I suppose we COULD solve capitalism, at the expense of a whole lot of other problems that are equally meh-to-bad.

Governments are fundamentally resource management machines though, and it's really stupid to pretend they aren't. With resource management, comes capping the fuck out of companies (specialists) that abuse the system (monopolies/oligarchies). When a government doesn't do that (whatever the method), it's failed its purpose as a government and also needs to be put down (revolution).

[solarpunkshoppe]

Recycling And Salvage Practice!

I've recently come into possession of a very neglected (3+ years in a shed where winter happens) one of these "power wheel" toys. Batteries are probably shot, but motors might be good. These toys are for small children to drive around in. Can usually haul two children at a time.

What uses could the resulting salvage be turned into?

Components:

- plastic frame

- possible drive train

- gears

- motors

- plastic wheels

- (possibly more, but that's what I can think of)

Tell me in the tags or reblogs!

[anik211]

Recycling Solar Panels: A Path to Sustainable Solar Energy 🌞♻️

The transition to solar energy is a cornerstone of the global shift toward sustainability. However, with more solar panels reaching the end of their life cycle, we must tackle the challenge of solar panel waste responsibly. Recycling solar panels isn’t just about waste management; it’s about recovering valuable materials and reducing the environmental impact of solar energy production. Let’s…

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Researchers develop method for upcycling plastic waste into soap

A team led by Virginia Tech researchers has developed a new method for upcycling plastics into high-value chemicals known as surfactants, which are used to create soap, detergent, and more. The work was published in Science. Plastics and soaps tend to have little in common when it comes to texture, appearance, and, most importantly, how they are used. But there is a surprising connection between the two on a molecular level: The chemical structure of polyethylene—one of the most commonly used plastics in the world today—is strikingly similar to that of a fatty acid, which is used as a chemical precursor to soap. Both materials are made of long carbon chains, but fatty acids have an extra group of atoms at the end of the chain. Guoliang "Greg" Liu, associate professor of chemistry in the Virginia Tech College of Science, had long felt this similarity implied that it should be possible to convert polyethylene into fatty acids—and with a few additional steps to the process—to produce soap. The challenge was how to break a long polyethylene chain into many short—but not too short—chains and how to do it efficiently. Liu believed there was the potential for a new upcycling method that could take low-value plastic waste and turn it into a high-value, useful commodity.

Read more.