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From trash to treasure

We live in a throw-away world, where today's gadget de jour is tomorrow's rubbish.

This leaves us with a growing problem -- what do we do with all the e-waste that seems to be growing to unmanageable levels?

Some companies have tried to collect it all up, throw it in containers and export it to low-wage countries where crowds of bare-footed workers huddle over open fires and hot sticks, prizing the valuable bits from the not-so-valuable and earning pence a day in the process.

Other strategies involve simply burying the whole lot in a landfill somewhere, hoping that there aren't too many heavy metals that might leach slowly into the water-table and turn the next generation's children into three-eyed monsters.

But is there an alternative?

Well I know that when I was a young lad, keen on science, technology and electronics, I would regularly trawl through scrap-heaps and piles of rubbish looking for gold.

No, not the lustrous, shiny, yellow gold from which jewelery and low-resistance electrical contacts are made. I'm talking about old bits of electronics that I could strip down for parts and then rebuild into devices of my own design.

No bit of old electronics was safe from my magpie-like salvaging and collecting.

My father's shed was eventually filled to near-capacity with old PA amplifiers, radios, battery chargers, transformers, valves, motors and just about every other type of device or component that used electricity.

I would spend hours, stripping down these devices and carefully filing each and every component into cardboard boxes. At one stage I must have had nearly a hundred 6SN7 valves and more than twenty 807s.

Back in those days, transistors were much harder to come by and more highly prized -- but having an eagle-eye and being willing to "rip into" any discarded device that might contain a sliver of doped germanium meant I gradually built up a nice collection of OC71, AC128, AC187/188 and even some AD161/162 devices.

Eventually, I had an inventory that would have made any electronics enthusiast proud - and I got it all for free!

These days of course, things are rather different.

Instead of using universal building blocks such as discreet transistors, modern electronic devices tend to be a sea of custom chips or specially programmed ASICs, FPGAs or microcontrollers. Re-using these devices is often nigh on impossible -- but there are still gobs of resistors, capacitors, regulators, diodes and other devices on those boards.

Perhaps what we need, if we're to make a tiny dent in our e-waste problem, are some challenges which seek to get people repurposing popular throw-away components.

When you look at how many old PCs and monitors hit the scrapheap every day, I wonder what kind of great (and educational) new things could be built from some of their parts.

Old CRT monitors (and TVs) might have great EHT generators that could be used for all manner of cool experiments.

PC motherboards have plenty of capacitors and regulators, along with quite a few discrete devices that could be cobbled together into any number of really handy projects.

I wonder if it's worth creating a "Treasures from Trash" website, in which folk are encouraged to submit their own projects based on parts salvaged from otherwise junked bits of electronics?

Perhaps one of the environmental agencies or groups would be prepared to sponsor such an initiative and it would not only inspire folk (especially kids) to learn more about electronics but also turn stuff that was previously thrown away into something worth hording.

Has someone already done this?

Thoughts from readers?

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