Awesome Crafts Made from Recycled Tech Parts

Folks at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) came together recently to create crafts from old tech parts that would otherwise have ended up in landfills.  Computer parts ranging from keyboard keys to chips and wires adorn items like photo frames, earrings, and even a beer cozy.  Some are just plain silly while others are downright cool.  Check out the photos below! Great job, guys – let’s continue finding new ways to reuse this stuff instead of just throwing it out!

Link [NNEDV]

African Minerals and Electronics: Technology Soaked in Blood

How much did you pay for your Playstation 2? Your laptop and cell phone? Chances are, it wasn’t too much, but someone else paid a far higher price than a week or two’s salary so that you could have those things. While we Westerners enjoy a wealth of electronics that entertain us and help make our lives more convenient, over in Africa, people are dying because of an ore called coltan that’s used to create those electronics.

Coltan is short for Columbite-tantalite. It’s refined to create a heat-resistant metal powder called tantalum that sells for $100 a pound and is a key component in everything from mobile phones to computer chips. Most of the tantalum used in electronics comes from legitimate mining operations in countries like Australia, Canada and Brazil, but as demand for the substance has surged, illegal operations have cropped up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There, coltan mining is being exploited as a source of revenue for warring rebel groups. In effect, it’s being stolen from the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which desperately needs the income, and illegally sold to companies like SONY.

As if that weren’t enough, the UN also discovered that Rwandan rebels and soldiers were using prisoners of war and children to do the dirty work, sending them down into the mines.

From TowardFreedom.com:

“Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms,” said British politician Oona King, who was a Member of Parliament from 1997 to 2005.

While most of the fighting ended in 2003, there are still Western companies that continue to mine coltan in Congo or purchase illegally obtained coltan from miners in the country. Some of the companies have been named as Eagle Wings Resources International of Ohio, Cabot Corporation of Boston, and Chemie Pharmacie Holland of the Netherlands. These companies have been charged by a London-based group called Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) and the UN with stealing millions of dollars of resources from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Despite being called to action by RAID and the UN, Western nations aren’t responding to the charges, refusing to look into the investigation. The U.S. government reportedly pressured the UN to drop the charges against the American companies involved. RAID says that the UN caved in because they’re afraid that if Western mining companies are prosecuted out of Africa, China may step in. China has signed many resource concessions with African nations including Sudan and Nigeria.

So, how exactly is tantalum used in the items that we enjoy in our 21st century electronics-laden lives? Tantalum’s unique ability to withstand extremely high temperatures makes it the perfect material for electric capacitors, which are used to store energy in the electric field between conductors in an electronic device. The more we buy cell phones, laptop computers, gaming consoles and other electronic devices, the more the demand for tantalum goes up.

At this point, there’s not much consumers can do about the issue aside from limiting the purchase of electronic goods as much as is feasible. Most of the onus is on manufacturers of electronics, who must find legitimate sources of coltan.

The world’s largest maker of tantalum capacitors, U.S.-based Kemet, has vowed to ensure that the coltan used in their capacitors is not from Congo. Their suppliers will be forced to verify the origins of the coltan they sell.

Unfortunately, coltan and tantalum changes hands so many times between various companies before it ends up in the actual product, it’s hard to verify exactly how companies get it. SONY, for one, denies that the tantalum in their products came from Congo despite allegations to the contrary.

From TowardFreedom.com:

David Barouski, a researcher and journalist from Wisconsin, says it is certain that the coltan from this conflict is also in SONY video game consoles across the world. “SONY’s PlayStation 2 launch (spring of 2000) was a big part of the huge increase in demand for coltan that began in early 1999,” said Barouski, who has witnessed the chaos of eastern DRC firsthand.

Apparently, statistical analysis shows that it would be near impossible for SONY to have manufactured all of those Playstations without using Congolese coltan. SONY still uses tantalum in many of their products, though they say they’re ‘satisfied’ with the assertions from their suppliers that it does not come from Congo. Many other companies can offer only vague assurances that their sources are legitimate, saying it’s impossible to be entirely sure where the metal comes from and that all they can do is trust their suppliers.

It’s difficult to say how many other metals and materials used in electronics might be mined in such a way, or how exactly they might be affecting the environment. No major studies have been done that show where each component in an electronic device is originally derived from. That’s what’s ultimately so frustrating for consumers. Since the parts for the more complex items we purchase come from so many different sources, it’s impossible to make sure what you’re buying hasn’t come at the expense of another person’s life.

Perhaps what we really need is some kind of certification system that manufacturers must participate in, that details the sources of their materials. Companies undoubtedly take a lot of shortcuts to make bigger profits, and the only way to protect against things like the Congo coltan issue is to hold them accountable. The appetite for electronics isn’t likely to die down any time soon – if anything, it will continue to grow. We need technology in order to make a better future for ourselves and the world - but that technology needs to be smart and green, not soaked in blood.

Link [TowardFreedom.com]
Photo credit: Flickr user Mngillen + Pulitzer Center

‘RepRap’ Robot Can Replicate Itself

It’s begun. The robots are taking over – plastic robots, to boot. English researchers have created a robot that can create 3-D replicas of objects like shoes and coat hooks – and can even replicate itself. It’s meant for the average person to have on their desktop, so you can create common plastic items as needed in your own home.

From PC World:

Scientists from the University of Bath in England unveiled an open-source machine that acts like a three-dimensional printer. Instead of printing out documents or pictures on paper, this printer uses blueprints to produce 3-D plastic objects.

The machine has been dubbed RepRap, which is short for replicating rapid-prototyper.

The goal is to eventually build a robot that can produce individual processors and circuit boards so people can build their own computers, according to Zack Smith, director of the RepRap Research Foundation.

Smith explained that unlike a regular printer that uses ink, RepRap heats up plastic and then squeezes it out into a line. The lines are built up into usable forms as they solidify. So far, the robot has made everyday plastic objects, like door handles, sandals and coat hooks. The machine has also successfully copied all of its own structural pieces.

It’ll likely be about 20 years before the robot can fully replicate itself. So, those of us with the sense to realize that giving machines intelligence is a deadly mistake have some time to start preparing.

Seriously though, this machine has the potential to either produce tons of useless plastic junk that will end up polluting the earth – or it could reduce our dependence on China for cheap manufacturing. (Chris DiBona, Google’s Open Source Programs Manager, said “Think of RepRap as China on your desktop”.)

The jury’s still out on how good it would ultimately be for the planet. It certainly seems like it could potentially cause a copyright lawsuit extravaganza as people stopped purchasing everyday items from stores and just created them at home.

Get more details at the RepRap website.

Link [PC World] + [RepRap]

Awesome Aussie Analog Traffic Signal

We all do it: treating yellow lights like they mean ‘speed the hell up to make it through’ instead of ‘slow down’. Our modern electric traffic lights make it hard to tell how much time you have left, but this beauty from Australia shows you whether you need to hit the brakes or not.

From Gizmodo:

Instead of solid lights, the analog rotating signal shows you exactly how much time you’ve got left in a green or a red, allowing you to better time your “floor it, we can make it” so as to not run the light and get caught by the intersection cameras. It’s an easy solution that can be rigged into current light schemes by putting a countdown number in each light instead of just a solid color.

It was used between the 1940s and 1970s. Old school analog stuff was so much cooler looking than the ultra modern digital aesthetic we’ve got going on now, don’t you think?

Link [Gizmodo]

Man-Made Noise Interfering with the Earth’s Ecology

Shhh – do you hear that? It’s the sound of us effing up yet another part of ecology. Man made noise may actually be altering the sounds we should be hearing all day and night – those of nature. Field scientist Bernie Krause has been studying nature sounds for decades, and he’s noticed something disturbing: the natural sound of the world is vanishing.

Wired Magazine has it:

Krause has a word for the pristine acoustics of nature: biophony. It’s what the world sounds like in the absence of humans. But in 40 percent of the locations where Krause has recorded over the past 40 years, human-generated noise has infiltrated the wilderness. “It’s getting harder and harder to find places that aren’t contaminated,” he says.

This isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. The contamination of biophony may soon become a serious environmental issue — Krause says that man-made sounds are already wreaking havoc with animal communication. We worry about the carbon emissions from SUVs and airplanes; maybe we should be equally concerned about the racket they cause.

Krause’s argument is simple. In a biophony, animals divide up the acoustic spectrum so they don’t interfere with one another’s voices. He shows me a spectrogram of a wilderness recording, in which all the component noises are mapped according to pitch. It looks like the musical score for an orchestra, with each instrument in its place. No two species are using the same frequency. “That’s part of how they coexist so well,” Krause says. When they issue mating calls or all-important warning cries, they aren’t masked by the noises of other animals.

Nature has a way of delicately balancing every aspect of the world’s ecology, and as we humans have become more technologically advanced, we’ve fallen out of our natural place in the world and become tyrants, out of touch with our surroundings. Animals communicate with each other through sounds, and when our loud planes, construction noises and vehicles cover those sounds, an imbalance occurs. Suddenly an animal can’t make itself heard. While this might seem like a very small thing to some people, it can have huge effects on the ecosystem over time. It’s been suggested that we don’t just develop ‘green tech’, but ‘quiet tech’ as well. We certainly wouldn’t want to find out too late that yet another aspect of our dominion over the earth has created irreparable destruction.

Link [Wired Magazine]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Eco Geek Says It’s Time to Stop Sending Letters

Yesterday, the price of stamps went up again by a penny. It wasn’t all that long ago that you could send a letter for 25 cents, and now it’s 42 – a pretty sharp increase in such a short amount of time. Of course, part of that is due to the fact that we now use electronic communication so much more often, and that is a good thing for the earth – it means far less waste ends up in landfills.

Eco Geek thinks it’s a fine time to stop sending letters, and they’ve provided a list of ways you can avoid using stamps: through scanning, online bill pay, e-cards, video letters, choosing postcards instead of letters when you do have the urge to do it the old fashioned way and finally, avoiding air mail at all costs. Makes total sense, right? Especially the air mail bit – what a waste of carbon emissions. People are very impatient these days.

So why is my eyelid suddenly twitching? Why do I feel a sense of dread, like something is terribly wrong? Oh, right – I was an English major. I’m a literary and history dork. I have a passion for all things romantic and old-fashioned, and that love of parchment paper and quills and envelopes sealed with wax is completely at odds with my desire to be more ‘green’. I am a collector of old, dusty, well-worn books and a lover of language. I am a scholar of the Italian Renaissance, and wrote my thesis on a long-dead European daughter of a pope. I hate acronyms and techie newspeak (or what nervous parents refer to as NetLingo) like ‘LOL’, ‘BRB’ and ‘AFAIAA’. When I use them, I do it with sarcasm, but despite that, a little part of me dies every time.

In this way, I represent the resistance to change that’s making it difficult to get a momentum going in this fight against global warming and everything that goes along with it. I treasure old things, and mourn the loss of the art of letter writing. I’m sad that kids are no longer taught cursive handwriting in school. I think it kind of sucks that typing has taken over as the dominant form of nonverbal communication. But, I don’t want to be one of those people that holds us back from moving into an age that could save us from ourselves.

I think it’s okay to write handwritten letters every now and then. We just need to make up for it in other ways. For example, I’m funneling my love affair with old things into a sort of recycling effort. I choose second-hand before new, any time I get the chance. I keep odds and ends like pretty soap wrappers and nicely printed cardboard product packaging to use for handmade cards. I don’t like the idea of a future where kids don’t even know how to write words out, and can only type them – so I want to make sure that those kinds of skills get passed down. I’m afraid of the truth in fiction like Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and even the action film Equilibrium.

Essentially, I will be one of those people who fights to preserve some of the personality and history behind written communication, but I’ll do it in such a way that prevents me from being part of the problem.

What say you? Will you give up hand-written communication for the environment?

Link [Eco Geek]
Image credit: Ballantine Books

Surf the Web, Stay on Top of Green News in Eco-Chic Style

If you want to get in on what all the cool kids are doing, check out Flock’s new ‘Eco Browser’. It’s the greenest way to surf the web! Basically, you can do all of the things you normally do in whatever browser you’re currently using, plus you can set up all your favorite green news feeds to get your daily dose of green goodness. It’s similar to the Mozilla Firefox setup, which will make all of us anti-IE folks happy.

From Flock:

Flock has partnered with leading respected content and opinion leaders from around the web to bring you the latest breaking news. Here’s just a sampling of the sites that are preloaded into the Flock Eco-Edition browser: Treehugger, Think MTV, Environmental News Network, Ecorazzi, National Geographic, Green Yahoo, Grist, Spring, Planetgreen and many more…

I just downloaded it myself and must say it’s pretty slick. It seamlessly pulls together all the content you’re likely to need on a daily basis. Special tools make it easy to stay connected via Flock-supported social networks like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. I got all my feeds loaded up and found some new favorites in the process. It’s easy to learn and use, and it looks mighty purty.

Solar-Powered Boat Does Not Come With Sexy Mannequins

Remember those pedal-powered boats you would always beg your parents to take you out on — only to get tired half-way out, cry, and watch as your parents struggled alone to get back to shore? Generally, a fight would ensue, followed sometimes by divorce, and the painful memory that it all started with your whining.

Thankfully, there are new advances in pedal-powered boats that will help avoid such conflicts. Take a look at this concept by French designer Jonathan Mahieddine that incorporates solar power and human power into once nice package. Adding to the amenities of your average human-powered boat, there’s a sun deck and easy-dive access. The best part, however, is what happens when you get tired of pedaling around the bay. Just flip a switch and cruise your way home to continue the family fun unimpeded. Don’t you just love renewable energy? It’s just a concept now, but for the sake of parents everywhere, let’s hope this one hits the waves soon.

via Ecofriend

If We Can Build BigDog, We Can Engineer a Green Society

Have you seen the video of BigDog, a project developed by Boston Dynamics for the U.S. Military? BigDog is a four legged robotic pack mule that is at once awe inspiring and a little terrifying (cough**Skynet**cough). Pay attention to the BigDog collecting itself after it almost slipped on the ice halfway through.

If we walked on the moon almost 40 years ago, and can make crazy ass robots like this today, how could we not be able to engineer our society so that it doesn’t destroy the environment in which it lives? We’re barely flexing our ability to engineer a clean (notice I didn’t say cleaner) way of living the good, modern life.

Japan Steel Works- Builds 600 Ton Parts for Nuclear Power Plants and Samurai Swords

Bloomberg has a fascinating article about Japan Steel Works Ltd., the only company in the world capable of manufacturing the central piece of a nuclear reactor’s containment vessel in a single pour, which is important for safety considerations. The piece starts life as a 600 ton ingot with a required down payment of $100M that takes three months to produce. There’s a years long back log to order one if you’re in the market.

Here’s a quick bit of the story from Bloomberg:

Orders for nuclear generators are multiplying as electricity use surges worldwide and governments pressure companies to cut carbon emissions to fight global warming. As many as 237 reactors may be built globally by 2030, an average of more than 10 a year, according to the World Nuclear Association in London. That compares with 78, or fewer than four a year, started since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown in Ukraine.

Given Japan Steel’s limited capacity, the math just doesn’t work, said Mycle Schneider, an independent nuclear industry consultant near Paris. Japan Steel caters to all nuclear reactor makers except in Russia, which makes its own heavy forgings.

Competitors’ Moves

“I find it just amazing that so many people jumped on the bandwagon of this renaissance without ever looking at the industrial side of it,” Schneider said.

It would take any competitor more than five years to catch up with Japan Steel’s technology, said the company’s chief executive officer, Masahisa Nagata.

Rivals are working to break the Japan Steel stranglehold, including South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co. and Japan Casting & Forging Corp., a joint venture of Nippon Steel Corp. and Mitsubishi Steel Manufacturing Co.

The coolest part of the story is that the other product made by Japan Steel Works are $10,000 samurai swords. The have craftsman who forge them in a special little hut up the hill from the main building using ancient Japanese forging techniques. Pure Awesome.

Link [Bloomberg] via Gizmodo

Photo credit: Flickr user renfield

Amazing Video: The Art of Cutting Down Lots of Trees

Excuse my French, but holy shit! I had no idea just how fast and efficient technology has come in the art of cutting down trees. Watch this video.

We keep on biggering, and biggering, and biggering, and biggering…

Via Walyou

Scientists Bending Nature to Build a Tear-Free Onion

As much as I dislike the feeling of sulphuric acid forming in my eyes whenever I chop up an onion, I’m much more comfortable with the stinging tears than the idea that we can and should genetically engineer away all the sharp points of life. Scientists are working on a tear free onion, Yahoo news has it:

WELLINGTON (AFP) - Scientists in New Zealand and Japan have created a “tear-free” onion using biotechnology to switch off the gene behind the enzyme that makes us cry, one of the leading researchers said Friday.

The discovery could signal an end to one of cooking’s eternal puzzles: why does cutting up a simple onion sting the eyes and trigger teardrops?

The research institute in New Zealand, Crop and Food, used gene-silencing technology to make the breakthrough which it hopes could lead to a prototype onion hitting the market in a decade’s time.

Colin Eady, the institute’s senior scientist, said the project started in 2002 after Japanese scientists located the gene responsible for producing the agent behind the tears.

“We previously thought the tearing agent was produced spontaneously by cutting onions, but they proved it was controlled by an enzyme,” he told AFP from his home outside Christchurch.

“Here in New Zealand we had the ability to insert DNA into onions, using gene-silencing technology developed by Australian scientists.

“The technology creates a sequence that switches off the tear-inducing gene in the onion so it doesn’t produce the enzyme. So when you slice the vegetable, it doesn’t produce tears.”

Link [Yahoo News] via Boing Boing via Fortean Times