July 1st: Smoke Free And The No Waste Weee

Today sees two laws come into force. Obviously the new restrictions on smoking in public areas came into play at 6am in England today. I’m looking forward to a quiet meal somewhere without the smoke.

All Go Weee
And finally, many years after I went to Brussels for initial training the WEEE legislation finally comes into play to help deal with our increasing electronic mountain or discarded technology electrical items. It’s all still a bit suck it and see and progress will be reviewed again in 2009. I’m doing my bit anyway and helping to reprocess at last some of that surplus technology and redeploying to people who can make use of the kit.

Recycle and Reuse

Please feel free if you’re in London, Beds, Herts & Bucks and looking to responsibly pass on redundant computer equipment. I help to reprocess the equipment and redeploy to low income, charity, community groups, individuals and non profit organisations. Get in contact if you think I might be able to help.

WEEE Don’t Need No Education?

July 1st is not only the date that we can all enjoy a restaurant meal or a drink in the pub without smoke but also the date when Britain finally complies with the horrendously named Acronym laden WEEE legislation which stands for The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive.

I took part in some training to do with this legislation some years ago in Brussels and it was hard to bring anything useful away from it as Britain was such a fragmented entity when it came to recycle and reuse legislation compared to Europe with a variable policy differing from county to county with little help for recyclers from central government and so it was hard to see how it could be enabled as effectively here. It’s taken the UK some years to implement the legislation which was introduced back in 2001-2003 in many EU countries.

In essence WEEE deals with what happens to all our electrical items when they die (‘this is an ex telly, it has ceased to be’ ) and extends the responsibility of the original manufacturer to make provision to take back their own products at the end of their useful life rather than let it all go to landfill. So after July 1st we will not be able to discard electrical items alongside our general waste and there will be greater provision at local recycling and waste centres to take these and we’ll see more companies make arrangements to take these items back directly. Manufacturers will also be able to charge slightly more for products as they will be required to contribute to a mutual fund which helps deal with taking electrical items back when made by a manufacturer that had since ceased to exist.

In Europe, when I did the training there were already regional drop off points in many EU member states and return areas at local electrical stores which took the pressure off the sea of fridges and dead washing machines that often build up in our local council tidy tips.

We also need to be slightly skeptical of what the manufacturers do after taking these items back. It does not necessarily mean that they won’t then dispose of them in an environmentally sound way and many commercial recyclers still see the exporting of redundant technology to third world countries as a viable answer when in fact it’s largely just shifting the problem abroad despite the good intentions of putting technology into needy hands.

The legislation does give a higher priority to reuse rather than recycling though in the public mind these two processes are often deemed to be the same thing.

The counter productive side of Weee is that people like myself who take items in for reuse can legitimately charge for taking away these items whereas the pressure has always been on trying to make money from reuse rather than the service of collection. Certainly it now costs many recyclers money to safely dispose of many items that cannot be effectively recycled or reused.

We also don’t have many reuse shops in the UK. In fact many charity shops no longer accept electrical items due to the expense of testing them for electrical safety and the risk of any adverse situation arising from our increasingly litigious culture.

I would hope that as this legislation begins to bite the manufacturers will begin to build electrical items with more forethought regarding their potential future recycling potential and the impact on the environment.This is a lot to ask as not everything can be made economically from green friendly parts but making an item easier to break down into its component parts at its end of life would be a great help.

The worst case scenario is that manufacturers and electrical retailers just place their own tax (which legislation says should be visible and defined) on electrical goods and use it as a way to look green but just have another excuse to make more money whilst not really making a serious dent on a serious problem.

A New Exclusive Life For Many Old Drawers

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I have to applaud anybody who manages to make a decent living from recycling items that others discard. This controlled chaos design for a chest of drawers made from discarded individual draws and so each arrangement being unique and numbered is a different approach but if they are managing to shift them at the quoted €16,600 price tag then I take my imaginary hat off to them.

Design: Tejo Remy (NL) for Droog Design 1993

Things that the everyday folks leave behind

Monday’s donation of surplus or redundant IT equipment was a small but diverse van full of equipment for reuse and redeployment. I have lots to sort out including a large server, 100 wireless access points with pcmcia cards, a largish colour laser printer and quite a few mono laser printers along with my first donation of a flat screen monitor (which may show how far along the changeover to flat screen monitors that we’ve all traveled as 1st and 2nd generation tft monitors are now up for disposal). I also have a number of scanners but no real call for them so will check them over and just give away via freecycle no doubt.A number of inkjet printers will go the same way. Nothing is dumped as I try to make sure that I’m not palmed off with too much broken equipment as that usually costs money to dispose of safely and responsibly.

I’m promised some laptops though laptops (I will not call them lappies) are not my favourite item for refurbishment. Hotly in demand but much more fiddly to turn around especially if some have broken screens, faulty keyboards or missing parts and dead batteries. Usually there is a way of reusing them all in one way or another but I tend to get wary of large donations of laptops due to the unavailability of many of the components. Broken screens are the most common fault.

I am, at least some of the time, the unwanted technology Womble.

What I’ve learned deploying Ubuntu desktops in the community

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I’ve got some donated computers with me at the moment that I’m refurbishing them for a community group . I thought it’s be worth detailing some of the changes I make to the Ubuntu desktop for these computers before I hand them out again for use. I find that you do have to take into account what potential users may feel is the norm in terms of layout and use. This doesn’t make it better as users will often use the term “easier” when in fact they mean “more familiar” in terms of that’s what they’ve seen before or what their friends may have at home and encountering something different can be disorientating for them and quite simply they may not know of any other ways of doing things. You can’t preach to the windows converted, all you can do is make users feel at home and present them with less of a difference when being given a computer with an open source desktop on it rather than Windows . If you’re deploying to the right sector of the community then the free desktop will have less of a rough ride.

So I tend to keep the default orange Ubuntu desktop as is (at least it’s not brown anymore) but change the following:

• Add the computer, home folder and web browser icons to the desktop
• Move the applications bar from the top default and swap with the lower bar
• Do all updates and add Automatix2 and sometimes easyubuntu programs
• Add many extra programs including Skype, Songbird music management, Google Picasa , Google earth
• Add the slab menu for user friendly program, prefs and system navigation
• Make sure, as much as possible that the most common browser plugins and multimedia playback is configured
• Add auto login to the default desktop
• Make sure that Deskbar search is visible and enable beagle desktop search (nearest thing to Apple’s spotlight)
• Community group deploymens get extra desktop lockdown and reset tools
• Easy “How-to use” screencasts made available in the home folder or on CD
• Add NX Free with no-ip client for any potential remote support.

I could deploy Windows 2000 or even XP on the right desktops through the Microsoft refurbisher program but frankly experience working with other reuse refurbishers has taught me I could be bogged down in support issues if not very careful. If I donate these machines and the user loads Windows from what ever source then great as that’s their responsibility and it give me a complete get out from some of the headaches of support. I’m not finding that I’m burdened with a high level of support issue with this setup though I am trying to be very targeted in who I’m passing these desktops onto and I haven’t positioned myself as a competitor to the high street (some peoples expectations for free or low cost refurbished computers can be a little high and it’s best to steer away from this demand as most of these people will stretch to the shiny new Vista or OS X desktop that they desire from the high street or elsewhere.

See also here for previous related musings.

Translations: French German Italian Spanish

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RECYCLING, REUSE AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

I did some volunteering yesterday and used my legacy IT support skills (what’s a geek-gal to do?).I have a love hate relationship with these so-called skills (dammit to my brain being wired up that way round) as I didn’t especially enjoy that particular career path but enjoy helping to do my bit for breaking down the digital divide with the specialised skills I acquired. Anyway first up was a furniture recycling centre who’d be given some computers that they wanted to clear of data and make usable to pass onto the community. Sadly the machines were borderline usable but I set a couple up with xubuntu (alternative low memory version) and by doubling their memory I left them in as usable condition as I can make pentium II computers (which many tek-heads would only put to use as chunky door stops). After that I went to a community centre project that  were trying to set up open computer access at several  centres in the poorer areas of their town. The community centre was a proper affair, well patronised with a good cafe area. If the furniture place doesn’t shift the PII’s in a hurry and even poor people can be picky, then maybe I can take them off their hands and deploy them as thin clients in the cafe area of the community centre. Earlier in the week I’d been give around 14 ex-education systems which were really quite well specified, all upper end PIII’s and PIV’s together with a dual processor server which would make a great terminal server for the community project. I guess nothing I’ve learnt has been wasted and projects like these at least make me feel like I’m making a dent (in what I don’t really know). A second meeting with the community centre people is required and i’ll pitch my suggestions and hope to ultimately do some reasonably good reuse deployment. I could do with a few more similar projects as I can receive redundant equipment quicker than there are suitable outlets at the moment.