The London Science Museum has an exhibition called Dead Ringers, which is on the uses and abuses of discarded mobile phones. It includes some interesting information online. The exhibition goes beyond the simplistic statistics of our rapidly growing mountains of discarded IT stuff.
Beyond more traditional ideas of using specially made biodegradable materials and the idea of re-cycling our gadgets on interesting idea is the use of pasta to make circuit boards.
Naturally pasta is biodegradable but it also comes with an additional advantage. Since pasta quickly becomes soft when boiled it is easy to remove components which are attached to the pasta circuit board. This makes the job of re-cycling components more cost efficient and more attractive.
Is there a catch?
Naturally this is not all good. No, the concern is not that food production will be diverted to gadget-making but we do focus more on gadgets than on more basic necessities. The problem is that presenting solutions such as biodegradable materials relaxes concerns. We can collectively shrug and claim that the problem has been solved. This is not so. There remains a missing component for this to be true. We need harsher regulation to enforce rules demanding manufacturers use more biodegradable material in their gadgets. Market solutions would be a nice option but have proven in the past to be ineffective.
More on high tech trash here & here.
