On the Light Footprint of Laptops for Recycling Program
March 8th, 2005
We spent some time in an off-the-grid Permaculture eco-village in western North Carolina a few years back. One thing we became painfully aware of quickly was what a power hog your typical desktop PC is, especially if it has a CRT monitor.
The best solution for low impact computing where watts/amps are scarce and unreliable, the eco-villagers soom realized, are modest laptop computers. Rather than dump aged power hogs on our friends in developing countries, we should be concentrating on unwanted laptops. They are easier to ship globally, generally self-contained, storable in ICT centers where security might be an overnight issue, moveable/sharable, etc… and very light on electrical requirements, not to mention having their own built-in uninterruptible power supplies.
Laptops have been around long enough now and have gone through such price decreases that there are lots of still functional but unused ones around. As the applied R&D lab collaborating with Christina Jordan on her Life in Africa Network, this is what Sohodojo is doing. We’re putting the word out to round up unwanted laptops from our local community so we can send them to Christina for her newly opened and expanding LiA Webbed Empowerment Center in Uganda.
We know this isn’t a mega-scaled solution to the Big Picture problem that CompuMentor/TechSoup and Jim Lynch are working on, but it is an example of interpersonal networking and solutions in the Small Is Good World. If only we could connect hundreds or thousands of communities one-to-one with each other such that we could hand off rather than hand out.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
Entry Filed under: Globalization 3.0 and the Small Is Good World, Recycled Computer Initiative
On the Light Footprint of Laptops for Recycling Program
March 8th, 2005
We spent some time in an off-the-grid Permaculture eco-village in western North Carolina a few years back. One thing we became painfully aware of quickly was what a power hog your typical desktop PC is, especially if it has a CRT monitor.
The best solution for low impact computing where watts/amps are scarce and unreliable, the eco-villagers soom realized, are modest laptop computers. Rather than dump aged power hogs on our friends in developing countries, we should be concentrating on unwanted laptops. They are easier to ship globally, generally self-contained, storable in ICT centers where security might be an overnight issue, moveable/sharable, etc… and very light on electrical requirements, not to mention having their own built-in uninterruptible power supplies.
Laptops have been around long enough now and have gone through such price decreases that there are lots of still functional but unused ones around. As the applied R&D lab collaborating with Christina Jordan on her Life in Africa Network, this is what Sohodojo is doing. We’re putting the word out to round up unwanted laptops from our local community so we can send them to Christina for her newly opened and expanding LiA Webbed Empowerment Center in Uganda.
We know this isn’t a mega-scaled solution to the Big Picture problem that CompuMentor/TechSoup and Jim Lynch are working on, but it is an example of interpersonal networking and solutions in the Small Is Good World. If only we could connect hundreds or thousands of communities one-to-one with each other such that we could hand off rather than hand out.
–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–
Entry Filed under: Globalization 3.0 and the Small Is Good World, Recycled Computer Initiative
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