inkbluesky

I read an article last year written by a web designer who noted that when he first started out he was limited in his design ideas because he couldn’t afford all the software he needed to execute those ideas. He also said that to some extent that it taught him a lesson in being innovative with the tools he did have. I thought of him today when I came across this great collection of pictures at flickr,   Subway Sketches, NYC -  Created by ChildOfAtom.  What this guy has accomplished equipped with nothing but a simple ball point pen and paper is just amazing.

frozen lake wallpaper

The more things change the more they stay the same. A kind of follow up to this story on third world waste, Mountains of outdated electronics are rising worldwide –  

- and a United Nations-led initiative launched in Bonn, Germany Wednesday is trying to set standards on how to recycle it.

Known as “e-scrap” or “e-waste,” discarded electronics are one of the fastest-growing segments of municipal garbage, piling up three times faster than other refuse. Some of this waste is dumped in landfills, where the toxic substances it contains may leach into groundwater. But 80 percent ends up in developing countries where labor is cheap enough to make the harvesting of materials profitable. There, crude extraction methods and an absence of regulations expose workers to a host of toxic substances.

The UN initiative, called Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP), includes industry, environmental, academic, and government groups. Discussions revolve around how to make electronics easier to recycle.

Modern electronics are so complex that they don’t lend themselves to speedy disassembly. That means more labor, more labor means higher costs, and high costs make e-scrap recycling less attractive.

If products could be designed for easy dismantling, recycling would be profitable not only in poor countries, but in the United States and European Union nations as well.

One way to bring this about, experts say, is to hold firms responsible for their products from the beginning to the end of their life spans. Some companies, including Xerox, HP, and Dell, have proactively established recycling programs for their outdated products. Legislation mandating e-waste recycling is already in place in the EU and in four US states.

But as growing demand causes prices of various materials in today’s electronics to skyrocket, some argue that recycling is profitable now and necessary in order to keep rare materials in circulation.

“There is this urgent demand,” says Ruediger Kuehr, executive secretary of the StEP Initiative, “to establish better technologies in order to harvest valuable resources and to train people in developing countries” where much of today’s e-scrap goes for reprocessing.