Circuit Playdough Geek Proof

I ran into an old friend, Paul Sturtz, who mysteriously appeared in South Royalton VT the same day I had to cover for a one-day event in Tunbridge, Vermont.

When I was introducing the concept of "geeks of color" to Paul, the example I used was when I went to Egypt to visit our fair trade partner there, and I brought two "broken" laptops.  They were screened as non-working but not broken screen etc.  I arrived at Hamdy's office, gave him the two laptops.  He gave them both to a tech (now a facebook buddy of mine) and we chatted some more.  45 minutes later, his tech came back with two working laptops.  I gave one to Hamdy and the other I kept and worked on for the remaining ten days.

This activity, which produced zero waste, two laptops, and a job, is not considered legal by BAN.org but is explicitly defined as legal by the Basel Convention, which Basel Action Network promotes at times and opposes at times.


Here is a simple way to understand schematics.   Schematics are the way that circuit boards work.  Technicians put electric codes to find out where the circuit is broken.  Usually, a good tech knows by the make and model where the most likely "weak point" is in the chain, and they do the same repair on 80% of that model.

If you think this is beyond the skills of a foreign person, please take a moment to familiarize yourself with circuits via this playdough video produced by Wired.



In "fair trade recycling", you work out which models and types of unit the technician wants.  Sometimes they prefer a non-working X to a "tested working" Y computer.  They explain what they want, which tests they need performed, and you agree to meet the purchase order for the number of Xs they can handle.

They agree in turn to pay you for them, but to send a fallout report of any that were not correctly tested or repaired, which were damaged in shipping.  To get reimbursed, plus recycling costs, for ones they ccould not repair, they need to send the proof they dismantled them properly and recycled them properly.

It's easiest to do this with the contract manufacturing factories which orginally made the unit and which everyone (even Green-Thompson) agrees can legally do warranty repairs.  It's child's play.