Made to Export: E-Non-Waste Laptop

Here's the perfect response to Jaime Guittierez song, "Clean the Fan", posted ten days ago.  I found this on Twitter, posted by SmartPlanet.com.  A good idea.


"Students from Stanford and Finland's Aalto University have developed a prototype laptop that can be disassembled in less than three minutes without the use of any tools. Once it's taken apart, the laptop's materials can easily be recycled. SmartPlanet talks to the inventors about their design concept and gets a hands-on demo of the process."
 When I trolled around at NESDA (National Electronics Service Dealers Association - the TV repairman guild here in the USA), I found the most popular brand was one never mentioned in "e-waste" press.  Hitachi was the first television company to bend over backwards to make maintenance and repair easy.  They published repair schematics for free, online in the early 1990s, when other original manufacturers charged TV repairpeople $65 for manuals by mail. They identified which of their parts wore out (there is a weak link in every assembled electronic device), and put drawers in to service those areas.

When Wistron goes ahead with the one-laptop-per-child production (or one-smart-phone per child, it may turn out by the time it actually gains traction), I hope it's built with this philosophy in mind.



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