Recycling and Freecycling Information Technology

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Opinion

Recycling and Freecycling Information Technology

3/15/2007

By Terry Calhoun

[Editor's note: You can join Terry Calhoun at the all-new IT Trends Forum by clicking here.]

A crazy person collected 14,000 computer keyboards.

Not me, not me. I'm not that crazy. Years ago when my kids were little and I was their primary care giver, I learned that I could make them very happy on a Friday by taking them "yard sailing," and letting each of them spend a dollar or two on whatever they wanted to buy and bring home. We did this so consistently, that I often bumped into some of the serious collectors of things in the area, who kept asking me, "What do you collect?"

Eventually I decided to collect something I felt was interesting, with historical significance, and that might end up being an investment toward my retirement. My personal collection of slide rules now numbers 223. Stan Flouride, however, the "crazy person" referred to in the title, collected 14,000 computer keyboards. Why? Well, you can either Google him and find out that way, or read on, and I'll tell you what he did with those keyboards.

I hate throwing things away. The architect/designer Bill McDonough points out in his trademark, audience-rousing speech, that the phrase "throw away" never really did have any meaning. Little did I know as I traveled back and forth from Vietnam in the late 1960s, being sent day after day to the back of my ship, the USS Comstock, to throw things "away" ... into the ocean. (The ship was named after the Comstock Lode, a hugely "successful" silver mine in Nevada, whose silver mining legacy is a major toxic dump.) McDonough says, "Where is away?" Think about that. "Where is away?" He points out that there is no such thing as "waste" in nature, as well. One thing's waste is another thing's raw materials or fuel.

McDonough posits a future where entire industries create things out of sets of chemicals that are used to manufacture things in ways that ensure a 100 percent recapturing of those chemicals at the end of the products' lifecycles. The chemicals are then reused. No waste. He calls it "cradle to cradle," and explains, "This approach models human industry on the integrated processes of nature's biological metabolism--its productive ecosystems--by developing an equally effective technical metabolism, in which the materials of human industry flow safely and productively."

I also love "old" things. Something tells me that as the world's population grows, almost any of the older things that are not incinerated or end up in land fills will become valuably rare. One story I read in the late 1990s posited a future wherein the heroine was confronting "the richest old man in the world." He was fondling a real wooden object, and at one point she reaches out to touch it and he grabs it away. She asks what it is, and he tells her that it is a slide rule, valuable beyond imagining--as an artifact of old technology. (I liked that scene!)