Have your outdated electronics taken up half of your room’s space? Perhaps they are piling up in the garage. Before you start planning to move to a large place, you might want to check out this ‘N+ew’ solution from Chilean Rodrigo Alonso. Of course, there are many recycling programs out there that will help you with your e-waste problems. But this new idea will help you to keep the memories as well.

Alonso has come up with a new way to make furniture out of all that electronic waste. Dubbed N+ew (or No More Electronic Waste), the showy seats are composed of e-wastes including circuit boards, multi-colored wires, computer components, QWERTY keyboards, and even scratched CDs.

He dumps all those stuff into a large cubic mold which is then filled with a clear epoxy resin and melted recycled aluminum to bind everything together. When it’s set, it will be polished to a high-gloss finish.

The result will be fine looking furniture which will also serve as a time capsule, and we won’t have to wait 100 years to take a peek at what’s inside.

The whole idea is definitely something that might become more popular in the coming years, especially because of the changing technological landscape which results in the introduction of new electronics which are e-wastes of the future.

Check out the gallery and you can place your thoughts in the box below.

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The biggest contributing factor to e-waste is upgrading cellphones, computers and televisions well before they start malfunctioning.  It’s really hard to resist that faster cpu, bigger screen and extra memory, but outdated technology is really outdating too fast and killing the planet.  Those “old” electronics end up traveling far away from where they were bought. The average mobile phone will work for about seven years, but the worldwide average for consumers to gets a new phone is just 11 months. Each year, the U.S. produces about three million tons of e-waste, and only around 25 percent of those products will be properly recycled. That’s a lot of digital crap.

What happens to that waste? How is it processed?

A group of MIT researchers hope to offer an insight into the journey of e-waste by tracking several discarded electronics. As part of the backtalk project, MIT’s 
SENSEable City Lab worked with the NGOs that ship outdated, refurbished laptops to developing countries. They equipped forty refurbished netbook computers with tracking software, and every twenty minutes, the laptops would send their location (determined using Google’s geolocation API) and a picture from their built-in camera. The people using the computers were informed of the project, and each laptop has a sticker explaining the project in the local language. The tracking data will be available to the public in the form of real-time visualizations, exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York starting July 24 2011.

In addition to seeing where the reused computers have found new homes, the second part of the backtalk project focuses on e-waste within the US. Volunteers in Seattle agreed to apply GPS-enabled location trackers to the electronics they planned to discard. The researchers were then able to map the movement of batteries, cell phones, printer cartridges and other electronics. Some of those products crossed the entire country on their way to recycling facilities, which raises important questions of whether recycling those electronics is worth it when just transporting them is wasteful.

Being “SENSEable”

While working on the project, the SENSEable City Lab collaborated with Qualcomm and LG to develop the tracking technology, and partnered with such NGOs as World Computer Exchange, the Peace Corps and World Teach. To see some of images from the e-waste once it landed in other countries like Indonesia, check out the video below.

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Sprint hopes to keep phones from ending up in landfills. Project Connect will take your unwanted mobile phones, batteries, chords, earphones, accessories, data cards and even instruction manuals. It doesn’t matter what make, model, carrier the phone is, or what condition it’s in. Proceeds from equipment collected will fund free Internet safety resources for kids.

To recycle your phone or whatever else you have lying around, you can pick up a postage-paid envelope at a Sprint store. It doesn’t have to be a Sprint phone for you to participate, and you don’t even have to step into a Sprint store if you don’t want to, you can print off a pre-paid shipping label on Sprint’s website.

Sprint will refurbish whatever parts they can so the equipment can be used again. Whatever is non-recoverable is recycled for base materials. Sprint also has a buy-back program which can be used toward the purchase of a new Sprint phone. According to their website, they’ve recycled over 16 million phones. PR stint or not, it’s a great way to get rid of the spare chords and old phones you’ve got shoved into a drawer somewhere.

[Griffith.edu, GreenTechnolog via Sprint]

Photo: Technology Review

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