Organised by the United Nations University under the aegis of the StEP Initiative, the EWAS has over the past three editions brought together nearly 60 young researchers from around the world, looking at solving the e-waste from different disciplinary perspectives. It has become the foremost forum available to young scientists to share their knowledge, interact with experts from academia, industry and policy and to develop collaborative partnerships.
Thanks to the generous support of SWICO Recycling, Dell, EMPA, Philips, Secretariat of the Basel Convention, Umicore and UNU, the EWAS2013 is set to take place in Switzerland, with the Secretariat of the Basel Convention hosting participants at the International Environment House (IEH) in Geneva.
The EWAS is open to PhD students, post-docs and early-career researchers from social and physical sciences investigating the political, social, economic, environmental, health or technological aspects of e-waste.
Topic areas include, but are not limited to:
• Transboundary e-waste flows, international e-waste governance
• Legislation review, policy & regulatory approaches & tools; standards
• Financing and business models; take back system design; reverse logistics
• Design for Re-use and Recycling (DfR) / Eco-design; corporate social responsibility (CSR); extended producer responsibility (EPR)
• Environmental & public health issues
• Consumer recycling / reuse/ disposal behaviour; consumer awareness campaign design and communication; marketing
• Technological developments in material recovery and disposal technologies; formal and informal recycling of e-waste;
• Critical raw materials in e-waste
• Modelling and forecasting methodologies
The deadline for submission of completed applications is July 31, 2013, with July 19th as the deadline for priority consideration for travel grants.
The jurors for this year’s International Sustainable Electronics Competition (formerly known as the International E-Waste Design Competition) have been announced. Returning again this year are past participants Bill Olson, Director of the Office of Sustainability and Stewardship for Mobile Devices Business, Motorola, Inc., and Jason Linnell, Executive Director of the National Center for Electronics Recycling (NCER). They are joined this year by: UIUC alum and President of HOBI International, Inc., Craig Boswell; competition founder, UIUC Professor of Industrial Design in the School of Art + Design and ISTC Affiliated Faculty Scientist, William Bullock; Executive Director of the Northeast Recycling Council and Program Manager for the State Electronics Challenge, Lynn Rubinstein; and CEO of iFixit and Dozuki, Kyle Wiens. For complete juror bios, see http://www.ewaste.illinois.edu/judges.cfm.
Registration is free and opens September 1, 2013. Participants are asked to explore solutions to remediate the existing e-waste problem, prevent e-waste generation in the future, and foster a more sustainable system for electronic device development, use, and management. Submissions include a project description, brief YouTube video, and bibliography. See the competition Rules for complete details on eligibility, categories, judging criteria, and submission requirements. Cash prizes will be awarded to the top three entries in each of two categories. For more information on participating, incorporating the competition into a class, or sponsoring the competition, contact Joy Scrogumvia email or at 217-333-8948.
Karen Morrison, at her museum studies minor defense, May 10, 2013, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In addition to conducting and sponsoring research, the Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI), works to integrate principles of sustainability into the curricula and educational experiences of engineers, industrial designers, computer scientists and others involved in the design, manufacture, consumption, and end-of-life management of electronic products. With its location on the UIUC campus, SEI is well positioned to work with the academic community to address electronic product life cycle issues and sustainability, as well as to involve students in such considerations via internships and research projects. The connections to discplines such as industrial design, materials science, and electrical or computer engineering are fairly obvious. But we like to point out that sustainable electronics can relate to virtually any field of study, especially when you consider how ubiquitous electronics have become in our society. We all use and benefit from electronics, and are all in some way part of the system related to electronic device production and consumption, which must be made more sustainable as part of the overall effort of making human existence more sustainable. So we need to all be part of considering and creating those sustainable solutions, regardless of factors such as our individual area of expertise. As a fine example of this, we had the pleasure of working with a student this past semester (Spring 2013) who was minoring in Museum Studies here at UIUC. “We” being me, Joy Scrogum, Co-coordinator for SEI, and ISTC’s Environmental Education Specialist, Kirsten Hope Walker. Karen developed an interactive display related to sustainable electronics for use in outreach activities. She was a chemistry major, so she was comfortable with science and translating scientific concepts to the general public, but she had no previous experience considering the sustainability of electronic devices. So it was great to watch as she worked her way methodically through the issues with our guidance, and considered how to present them, effectively learning the material and then figuring out how to teach it to others. Karen wrote the blog post below, describing her experience. We’re extremely proud of this intelligent, resourceful, and affable young woman, especially given her recent acceptance of a position with the California Council of Science and Technology in Sacramento. Congratulations, Karen!
Interdisciplinary is the new buzzword in academic circles. Being interdisciplinary is all about crossing boundaries and using techniques and notions that were designed or developed in one field to benefit or answer questions in another. Interdisciplinary is often used synonymously with progress, radical ideals, and breaking barriers, and many of the original melded areas (chemical biology or women’s studies) are today recognized as established disciplines in their own right.
By its very nature, sustainable electronics is an interdisciplinary field. The lifecycle of electronics – development, manufacture, sale, disposal or reuse – touches aspects of computer science, environmental law, operations research, sociology, human rights, and economics. The questions and problems in creating and empowering sustainable electronics are complex and cannot be addressed with simple answers.
One of the biggest challenges in sustainable electronics, then, is translating this complex problem to you and me (and the broader society we live in) and encouraging us to respond in some way.
This is where being interdisciplinary becomes helpful. Presenting material and then probing the public to engage and respond is one of the central tenants of modern museum studies. Although it is easy to think of the science museum where every panel is carefully constructed with simplistic information, or the art museum where visitors are visually stimulated and left to form their own conclusions, modern museums are aiming to do so much more. Museums exist in a unique sphere where people from different backgrounds and experiences can come to one location and engage with questions that are faced by our current society.
My goal in working with the ISTC Sustainable Electronics Initiative was to apply the theories and paradigms of content display used by museums to SEI. This involved four key steps: narrowing down the material, identifying the audience, creating display material, and revising the material iteratively.
In my initial discussions with Joy and Kirsten, we loved the idea of an interactive globe to show how the physical materials in a laptop move across the globe, from raw materials to the final product and sale. Logistically, however, this was difficult to execute in a reasonable amount of time. We also wanted material that was flexible and could be used for adult or school-age audiences.
With that in mind, I developed a scrolling presentation that identified the locations that laptop materials came from, the factories where parts were manufactured and assembled, the countries where laptops are sold, and where laptops move after their first use. Although this presentation met many of our content needs, it didn’t allow for people to engage directly with the material or choose what topics they wanted to learn more about. In essence, we were feeding information to people rather than engaging or provoking them to dive deeper on their own.
This realization pushed me to a web-based platform. Web 2.0 allows users to navigate through many layers of material at their own pace based on their personal interests (much like you’re doing with this post now!). Ultimately, this platform addresses many of the fundamental questions we wanted to originally address and will hopefully spur more discussion about the complicated questions faced in creating and maintaining sustainable electronics!
The International E-Waste Design Competition has changed its name, categories, & judging criteria. The competition, now known as the International Sustainable Electronics Competition, is part of the Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI) at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC). It originated in 2009, when it emerged from a class on e-waste issues taught by industrial design Professor William Bullock, an affiliated faculty scientist at ISTC. The competition was focused entirely on reuse of electronic scrap during that first year. What began as a local UIUC event became an international competition in 2010, with submissions being made online by college students and recent graduates from around the world. The competition has evolved a bit each year, and grew to incorporate the entire life cycle of electronics, rather than focusing solely on reuse. Organizers noticed that recent entries seemed to incorporate both prevention of e-waste generation (through design modifications to extend the useful product life cycle of electronic devices) and reuse of electronic scrap, regardless of whether or not they were submitted for the “Prevention” or “Reuse” category. So for 2013, categories have been changed to “Product” and “Non-Product,” with the concepts of prevention and reuse integrated throughout the revised judging criteria. The new name and judging criteria are part of the continuing effort to better focus the competition on ideas for a sustainable system for the design, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life management for electronics. The competition has always been open to students in any discipline, but most entries were from engineering or industrial design students. The new categories will make the multidisciplinary nature of the competition more apparent, as “non-product” entries could more obviously be made by students from other fields.
To learn more about the competition and new categories, visit www.ewaste.illinois.edu. Entries include, among other elements, a brief project description paper and YouTube video summarizing the concept. Expert jurors award cash prizes to the top three projects in each category. Registration is free and will open on September 1, 2013. For more information, contact Joy Scrogum at jscrogum@illinois.edu or 217-333-8948.
College students and recent graduates from around the world were encouraged to submit their ideas for products and services. The entries were ideas that prevent e-waste generation through life-cycle considerations (E-Waste Prevention Category) or that incorporate e-waste components into a new and useful item (E-Waste Reuse Category). The competition is designed to prompt dialogue about product designs for environmentally responsible computing and entertainment. To read the full press release, click here.
The winners were announced during a ceremony on December 4, 2012 at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), the coordinating agency for Sustainable Electronics Initiative. ISTC is part of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois. The webinar will be archived on the ISTC web site at http://www.istc.illinois.edu/about/sustainability_seminars.cfm in the next few days. In the meantime, if you would like to watch the webinar, visit https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/594203991 and enter your email address if you had previously registered for the webinar. If you had not registered, you may do so, and then watch the webinar at that link.
Jurors awarded monetary prizes to the top three projects within each category, along with one honorable mention award. The first place winners will receive $3000, second place is $2000, and third place receives $1000. A total of $12,000 was awarded, which has been made possible through generous contributions by Peter Mcdonnell (Friend level) and Dell (Platinum level).
Winners were as follows (see the full press release for brief project descriptions):
Reuse Category
Platinum ($3000): digitizer. This concept was submitted by a pair of industrial design students from the University of Wisconsin-Stout: J. Makai Catudio and Ryan Barnes.
Gold ($2000): The Wake-Up Project. The Wake Up Project team consists of three industrial design students from the University of Wisconsin-Stout: Danny Kopren, Sam Wellskopf, and Lennon TeRonde.
Silver ($1000): Fluorescence Microscopy Using A Recycled Paper Scanner. This concept was submitted by a recent graduate in electrical engineering (Dustin Gallegos), and two current students, one in biomedical engineering (Lillian Hislop) and the other in general studies (ZhanHao Xi), at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Prevention Category
Platinum ($3000): EverCloud. This team was comprised of five industrial design students from Auburn University: Sean Kennedy, Christi Talbert, Dylan Piper-Kaiser, Sarah Caudle, and Daniel Piquero.
Gold ($2000): E3: Energy Efficient Electricity. The concept was developed by three industrial design students from California State University at Long Beach: John Lee, Soyoung Bae, and Sam Sauceda.
Silver ($1000): loopbook—the future of computing. Loopbook was submitted by a recent graduate in product design and technology from the University of Limerick in Ireland, Damian Coughlan.
Honorable Mention
Sounds Amass.This concept was proposed by a recent graduate in industrial and product design from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Tai Ka Cheong.
The competition was started at UIUC in the fall of 2009. In 2010, the competition was expanded so students from all over the globe were able to submit their projects and an online video. Each project was judged on the project description and video. The international scope was evident through students who submitted entries from Bangladesh, Canada, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Turkey, and the United States. The jury was comprised of a variety of experts, including:
Jason Linnell, Executive Director, National Center of Electronics Recycling (NCER)
Bill Olson, Director, Office of Sustainability and Stewardship, Mobile Devices Business, Motorola, Inc.
Steven Samuels, Former Brand & Design Manager for ReCellular, Inc.
Kerstin Nelsen Strom, Ecodesign Section Chair, Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA)
Jennifer Wyatt, Environmental Scientist, Materials Management Branch, U.S. EPA Region 5
Videos from the winning entries will soon be available on www.ewaste.illinois.edu. In the meantime they are available on the SEI YouTube Channel. And you can watch them below. Congratulations to the winners and all of our participants for choosing to be part of the solution to the growing e-waste problem by conceiving of how our electronic products could be produced, used, and disposed of in more sustainable ways. Stay tuned to the competition web site for more information, coming in the new year, about the 2013 competition.
Reminder: Registration for the 2012 International E-Waste Design Competition will close at 4:59 PM Central time, tomorrow, November 1, 2012. If you have registered and are working on a submission, be sure to submit all required information before that time. Once the deadline passes, you will no longer be able to access your online submission form using your log in and password.
Participants are encouraged to enter required information, such as contact information and proof of eligibility for team members, as soon as possible. Please do not wait until the last minute to submit all of your information and end up racing against time to get necessary files uploaded. When updating your entry, it is important to remember scroll all the way down to the bottom of the submission form and click on “Update Project Information.” This saves the new material you added to your entry. Failure to click on the “update” button could result in information not being saved. You don’t want to be disqualified for not having a complete entry because you forgot to click on the “update” button, so please make sure to click that before you sign out at any point.
Jurors will begin to assess entries after the deadline passes, and will make final decisions by the end of November. Winners will be announced on December 4, 2012, at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center and via webinar. Details on registration for that webinar will be posted as the date approaches. Cash prizes, made possible by sponsors including Dell, Inc., will be awarded in each of two categories (E-Waste Prevention and E-Waste Reuse).
Presenters include William Bullock, Affiliate with the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center and Professor of Industrial Design in the School of Art and Design, U of I at Urbana-Champaign; and Joy Scrogum, Emerging Technologies Resource Specialist at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, Prairie Research Institute, U of I at Urbana- Champaign. Continue reading “Webinar Sept. 5–“Electronic Waste: Our Problem and What We Should Do About It””
This Fall, current college/university students and recent graduates will have an exciting opportunity to create useful and appealing products from e-waste—computers, printers, cell phones and similar materials that would normally end up in landfills. This is not only an interesting challenge, but an important social and environmental issue, as the U.S. EPA estimates that Americans currently own nearly 3 billion electronic products and that about two-thirds of the electronic devices removed from service are still in working order. However, only about 15% of this material is recycled while the majority is disposed in landfills.
The Sustainable Electronics Initiative(SEI,www.sustainelectronics.illinois.edu) and the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC,www.istc.illinois.edu) are once again pleased to announce the International E-Waste Design Competition (www.ewaste.illinois.edu), in which participants will explore solutions to this problem at the local level and beyond. At the conclusion of last year’s competition, $20,000 in prize money was awarded to six teams and three honorable mentions. Prize money was contributed by corporate sponsors including DELL and Walmart. The prizes for the 2012 competition are to be announced. For videos from last year’s competition, see www.ewaste.illinois.edu/.
Registration is free and opens September 1, 2012. College students and recent graduates are encouraged to submit their ideas for products or services that prevent e-waste generation through life-cycle considerations (E-Waste Prevention Category) or that incorporate e-waste components into a new and useful item (E-Waste Reuse Category). See the rules posted on the competition web site for complete details regarding eligibility and descriptions of project categories. One entry per person or team is allowed. Students are not allowed to be on more than one team, but students are allowed to submit a project with one team and additionally submit one individual project. Registration closes November 1, 2012 and winners will be announced in early December as the finale of ISTC’s Sustainability Seminar series for Fall 2012, which will be focused on sustainable electronics. The awards presentation will also be broadcast as a webinar. Continue reading “2012 International E-Waste Design Competition”
With the new year comes a new focus for the Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI). SEI continues to be a consortium dedicated to the development and implementation of a more sustainable system for designing, producing, remanufacturing, and recycling electronic devices. Members of the consortium include academia, non-profit organizations, government agencies, manufacturers, designers, refurbishers and recyclers. Over the next several months, our efforts will be geared more toward conducting and sponsoring research, as well as integrating principles of sustainability into the curricula and educational experiences of engineers, industrial designers, computer scientists and others involved in the design, manufacture and consumption of electronics products. We will be moving away from the previous paid membership structure to a more open network of like-minded individuals, organizations, and corporations who believe in working together to stem the tide of e-waste production through innovation and systems thinking. Bear with us over the next few months as we work to update our web site to reflect this slight shift. Joy Scrogum, Emerging Technologies Resource Specialist for the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), will be assuming responsibilities as Education Coordinator for SEI. Nancy Holm, ISTC Sponsored Research Program Coordinator, will serve as the SEI Research Coordinator.
The Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC), the host agency for SEI, is located on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and therefore well positioned to work with the academic community to address electronic product life cycle issues and sustainability, as well as to involve students in such considerations via internships and research projects. More information on possible student opportunities will be available on the SEI web site and blog as details are finalized. UIUC students and professors interested in participating in SEI activities should contact Joy Scrogum. Professors from other colleges or universities interested in, or already incorporating sustainability into their curricula, are also encouraged to contact Ms. Scrogum regarding potential collaboration. During the Spring 2012 semester, ISTC will be hosting a few seminars on sustainable electronics and for Fall 2012, ISTC is planning a full series of seminars on this topic. We hope to offer these seminars as webinars to increase the reach of the information presented. Again, watch our site for details in the coming months. Researchers or industry representatives interested in sharing information about their sustainable electronics projects should contact Nancy Holm.
SEI and ISTC will once again be hosting the International E-Waste Design Competition in 2012, though past participants should note that the registration period has been moved from the spring semester to fall (September 1, 2012-November 1, 2012). The shift in timing is meant to allow increased outreach and promotion of the competition, and allow more professors to incorporate the competition into course syllabi for the fall. Participants are asked to explore solutions to either remediate the existing e-waste problem or prevent e-waste generation in the future. The spirit of this competition is to prompt the industrialized world to dialogue about product designs for environmentally responsible green computing and entertainment. The goals of this competition are to learn about ways to reuse e-waste for new and productive means, explore ideas for how to address e-waste problems, and contribute to the body of knowledge that advances the practice of environmentally responsible product design for current and future computing technology products. Awards, jurors, and other details for this year’s competition are still in the planning stage, but check the competition site for updates in the coming months. Prize money totaling $20,000 was awarded to six teams and three honorable mentions at the conclusion of last year’s competition, with prize money contributed by corporate sponsors including DELL and Walmart. You can view the winning videos for the 2011 competition on the competition web site or the SEI YouTube Channel. Contact Joy Scrogum for more information or with questions related to the design competition.
Those of us at SEI look forward to a year full of collaboration, innovation, and steps toward sustainable solutions for electronics manufacturing and waste management. Happy New Year!
The United Nations University Institute for Sustainability and Peace (UNU-ISP) has announced its call for applications for the StEP E-Waste Academy–Scientists Edition (EWAS).
