CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - What's in your closets, basement, garage or attic?
If you're like many Americans, chances are you have at least one piece of electronic waste - an obsolete or non-functioning computer, printer, television, DVD player, cell phone or other electronic device - stashed somewhere.
"Each person stores their computers for an extra two years before they give or throw (them) away," estimates Willie Cade, the chief executive officer of PC Rebuilders & Recyclers, based in Chicago. Cade's comments appear in a draft report compiled by University of Illinois industrial design students who studied electronic waste, often referred to as e-waste.
The reason for keeping e-waste around is simple: People don't know what else to do with old electronic equipment. Although some communities have recycling sites, in many cases, e-waste gets carted off to the local dump or landfill. And even if it is "recycled," the end result may not be nearly as environmentally sound as one might expect.
Cade, who is scheduled to present testimony about e-waste before Congress today (Feb. 11), serves as a guest lecturer and industry liaison for the new course, which began last fall.
"In the United States, we probably have upwards of 2.5 million tons of this stuff dumped on the waste heap each year," said industrial design department chair and professor William Bullock.
Bullock developed and taught the e-waste course with assistance from Cade and other guest lecturers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere. Bullock, who also continues to teach a course on sustainable design, is offering a follow-up e-waste course this semester that focuses on the potential for creating innovative solutions to the growing international problem. According to Bullock, the curriculum - developed, in part, with support from the university's Environmental Council and the campus's Facilities & Services' Division of Safety & Compliance - is believed to be the only one of its kind offered by an industrial design program.
"Right now, unfortunately, there are no laws in the United States that I'm aware of that prevent you from throwing it (e-waste) in the municipal waste stream," Bullock said. "Unfortunately, it either winds up being incinerated or, more likely, if it is recycled, in many cases, it winds up being shipped to foreign countries where the toxic materials in it - mercury, lead, cadmium and other materials - are recovered with rudimentary means by hand, at great danger to the individuals involved. You've probably seen the pictures of children digging through trash heaps on foreign shores. ... This is just sad."
To give this semester's students the chance to develop creative, potentially viable solutions to the e-waste problem, Bullock decided on a hands-on, competitive approach that focuses on re-use. The rationale, he said, was to say, "OK, let's harness our collective energy to illustrate what we can do with some e-waste."
"We have perhaps the brightest students in the nation in industrial design and engineering, and in marketing and business, the arts and design, and other areas. We'll give them the challenge of doing something positive and showing how they can design to extend the life of this electronic waste."
To that end, an interdisciplinary design competition - open to all U. of I. students - is under way. Participants are competing for prizes that include scholarships.
Students, working alone or in teams of up to five people, may register for the competition through March 16.
Entrants will compete in two categories: "designer/artist," for entries that focus on the aesthetics and human factors of design; and "geek/technical," for entries that use electronic components to create functional devices.
Submissions are due by April 16 at Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright St., Urbana, Ill. (exact location to be announced). Entries will be exhibited and judged on the U. of I. Quad later that day.
Also planned in conjunction with the competition is a communitywide e-waste collection, scheduled from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Feb. 21 (Saturday) at Lincoln Hall. Community members are invited to clean out their closets and other storage areas, and drop-off e-waste at Lincoln Hall's circle drive on Wright Street. Acceptable donations include CPUs, monitors, keyboards, mice, printers, scanners and cell phones. Televisions will not be accepted. Drop-offs are limited to a car load.
Collected materials will be made available to design-competition participants, who are encouraged to re-use and/or incorporate the electronic devices - or parts from them - in their creations.
Bullock said he hopes this year's competition will be a pilot for a broader, national competition that might be organized at Illinois next year.
He also wants to expand on what he and his students have learned so far by exploring opportunities to fund and develop an International Center for the Advancement of Re-use of E-waste, or ICARE. Bullock credits Cade with the idea for the center.
"Such a center would research the e-waste problem and develop new policy and creative solutions, including better product design."
Bullock said it's obvious that U.S. consumers have a "new-is-better mentality," and appreciates that "we have a wonderful lifestyle." However, he said, "We also use a disproportionate amount of the world's resources to achieve that."
"As we're now part of a more global community, we have to be cognizant of our place and be good neighbors to our global partners," Bullock said.
"We only have one green planet as far as I know. If we took our lifestyle and had the rest of the planet come up to what we're doing, and the wastefulness that we have, the planet would be 'bye-bye' pretty quickly."
As an industrial design professor, Bullock said he has an even more personal motivation for exploring more viable means of addressing the mounting e-waste problem: "because we create the waste."
"My field, industrial design, is responsible either directly or indirectly for a lot of this e-waste that occurs. So my interest is that we should at least be involved in trying to do a better job.
"As good environmental stewards, we should be aware of what happens to this stuff and be better about designing it appropriately, and designing things that help individuals that are not going to wind up on the trash heap."
More information about the e-waste collection and competition is available online.