City of Sydney has set up Battery, mobile phone and light bulb Recycling Collection Stations at Neighbourhood Centres and Libraries....more
"TVs, computers, monitors, printers and computer accessories can be recycled at Randwick City Council’s recycling centre at Matraville for free.You can also drop off your TVs at Harvey Norman in Broadway, Alexandria, Bondi Junction and Moore Park and computer equipment can be taken to Officeworks in Alexandria and Glebe.....more
Aldi accepts Batteries at their stores...more
E-Waste and Recycling Old Computers"Electronic waste, e-waste, e-scrap, or Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is a loose category of surplus, obsolete, broken, or discarded electrical or electronic devices." - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste
"In order to manage this rapidly growing waste stream we need to understand the flows of electronic goods in society - from the perspectives of consumer behavior (consumption and disposal patterns) to the performance of producers through product stewardship (design, re-use, product recovery, recycling and disposal)." - http://www.naturaledgeproject.net/
Batteries and Capacitorstantalum capacitors are used in electronic equipment such as mobile phones, DVD players, video game systems and computers.The primary mining of tantalum is in Australia...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantalum. The Wodgina mine is an iron ore mine located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, 90 kilometres south of Port Hedland.[1]..http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wodgina_mine
Greenbushes' two major industries are mining, producing tantalite concentrates, lithium minerals, tin metal and kaolin; and timber milling ...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenbushes
Salar de Uyuni a salt lake in southwest Bolivia, near the crest of the Andes is part pf Bolivia's 43% of the world's lithium reserves...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni
"Each year, over 300 million household batteries are thrown away with ordinary waste, meaning a staggering 8,000 tonnes of batteries end up in landfill...That's why ALDI, proudly supported by Planet Ark, has become the first supermarket in Australia to offer a free recycling service for household batteries in every store"....
more about Aldi Battery Recycling.
Better late than never - Leichhardt Council Battery collection - Leichhardt Library (14 Oct 2015)
ITEM 31 SMALL BATTERY COLLECTION POINTS (NON LEAD ACID)
C580/11 RESOLVED HANNAFORD/COSTANTINO
That Leichhardt Council investigate:-
1. Suitable recycling processes for these non lead acid batteries and
2. If available, the setting up of collection points in council owned
properties eg Libraries, Neighbourhood Centres, Town Halls and
Depots.
3. That a report be brought back to the November Council Meeting.
This is page 37 of the Minutes of the Ordinary Meeting of [Leichhardt] Council held on the 18th day of October,
2011 and presented for confirmation this 22nd day of November, 2011. October%202011%20Minutes.pdf
The flip side of reducing e-waste, by extending the use of electronic and electrical equipment, is that there have been improvements in energy efficiency. In the case of the Versa 2200c - the power adapter alone, without connecting it to the notebook drew 7Watts of power. In comparison the power adapter for the 1997 NEC Versa 4230, without an indicator light, and a 2004 Targa, without with an indicator light in the adapter, disconnected from the laptop, drew less than 1 Watt (didn't register on the power meter which has a 1Watt threshold).
Modern netbooks such as the eeePC draw much less power while delivering much greater functionality.
"The EeePC 900 is RoHS-compliant but has yet to be certified for Energy Star 4.0 and EPEAT. Running my own tests, using a PS3 International Kill-A-Watt meter, the EeePC 900 fell well within the limits of Energy Star's specifications. The 14 Watts it consumed matches that of the Apple MacBook Air and the Fujitsu LifeBook P8010, but because it doesn't have all the necessary certifications, it doesn't earn PC Magazine's GreenTech Approved seal". - Review ASUS EeePC 900 (16-MAY-2008)
Digital picture frames are a convenient way to display our photographs. However, the quality of the picture often exceeds the capability of these frames. Reusing an old Laptop can provide a better quality picture. However, there are some hardware incompatibilities that you need to overcome.
The NEC Versa 2200c was released around 1995. It was the state of the art in Notebooks - weighing just 2.95kg, without the 0.5kg battery pack. However, both the rechargeable and internal battery have both failed. The weight and power requirements can be reduced further by removing the Toshiba MK1926FCV 814MB Hard Disk.
The notebook is equipped with two PCMCIA slots, a floppy disk drive, a 9.5inch 640x480 pixel 4096 Color Thin-film transistor (TFT) CCFT backlit monitor and 47MB of system/extended RAM. It doesn't have a CDROM or USB port.
The first thing to do is ensure all data has been wiped from the system. I did this by formatting the hard disk. However, the 2200c shipped with the Win95/Win3.1 operating systems pre-installed so, there was no way to reinstall the operating system. Further most modern software is shipped on a CDROM.
My first approach was to try to install Linux (open source software) on the laptop. This had variable success and I did manage, to create a bootable fdlinux floppy disk and on occasion login into a basic Linux System. However, the 2200c could not always read the floppy disk and did not boot consistantly. I used a USB external floppy disk drive to create the fdlinux floppy disk from the fdlinuxv2.1 floppy disk image. The installation of Linux on the Hard Disk is more problematic. Even with the use of an external, usb interface, there aren't Hard Disk images available. All I managed to do was copy a CDROM image to the hard disk look, which made it appear as a CDROM but not a boot device on the 2200c. When I eventually broke a pin on the drive, this was my cue to give up.
My second approach was to format a floppy disk with DOS (note this is licensed software), on a NEC 4230 running Windows 95. I then downloaded ShowJPG, the fastest and smallest DOS-based JPEG-viewer* and copied this to the floppy disk. The one shortcoming I have encountered is that is is only working with black and white photographs.
To create a slideshow:
showjpg nimbin.jpg -t55000 -q -e
showjpg shed-2.jpg -t55000 -q -e
showjpg hakea.jpg -t55000 -q -e
showjpg flannel.jpg -t55000 -q -e
showjpg curra.jpg -t55000 -q -e
showjpg xbush.jpg -t55000 -q -e
cls
autoexec
Pictview for DOS displays colour images on the NEC Versa2200c.
www.ramin.com.au/eco-sydney/e-waste.shtml © Ramin Communications 2010-15. Last modified 3 December 2015.
