Cartridge reuse and carbon emissions

Please take a look at a recent research looking at the impact of cartidge reuse on carbon emissions here.

PC Reuse in UK

Recycling and recovering end-of-use PCs seems to be the less-costly way to deal with the returned products after WEEE came into affect in UK recently. The other option could (should) be refurbishing and reusing the PCs, as Michael Dell pointed out. Every year 125M PCs complete their useful life for their users and enter into the waste stream.

Michael Dell proposes that these computers are as useful as the PCs in One Laptop per Child Project. So why directly recycle them when you can use them in a philanthropic cause like this project and be environmentally conscious too. A research by UN University in Tokyo shows that it is 20 times more energy efficient to reuse a PC- considering both the energy used to manufacture the PC and energy used to operate the PC. 75% of this energy consumption actually occur during the manufacturing of a PC. Moreover, these PCs has already have 3-4 more years of useful life- or value.

Cascaded re-use of products are not new- there are examples of cell phone re-use. Why recycle, (more of a cost-reducing activity) when you can re-use them by minimal refurbishing activities. If OEMs are not interested (some of them already refurbishing to re-sell), then philanthropic causes and not-for-profit organizations can play a key role in putting PC re-use in track, enabling cascaded use of these PCs for people in need. Computer Aid is a charity organization, they shipped 90K computers that are donated by UK companies to developing countries. If you can, please do support Computer Aid by being a donor for your organization to be an environmentally and socially responsible corporate citizen.

Please find more detailed information on reuse of PCs in the articles here and here.

E-waste realities

A recent article reveals the realities of complying with WEEE in Europe: Nancy Weil interviews with Kirstie McIntyre, HP's takeback compliance manager. There is more to complying with legislations: from designing the products to comply with them to collecting the end-of-life ones to deal with recycling issues. I don't even mention the issues on implications of e-waste on the population, on which I agree with Kirstie McIntyre.

Please read the article here for a different point-of-view to WEEE and compliance issues.

Rebirth of a product

Nabil Nasr, the director of National Center for Remanufacturing and Resource Recovery, defines remanufacturing as "the rebirth of a product." 100% agreement on this quote, also on his other ideas in a recent article published in TIME. This time, starting point of the article is Caterpillar's Shrewsbury plant in UK instead of Peoria plant in US. Please take a look at this article here. In a nutshell, this article reiterates the positive outlook for remanufacturing market -especially for automotive parts remanufacturing.