CGI Sustainability Article

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are a fantastic way to unite a workforce behind the aims of bringing global prosperity, equity for all, and just generally doing “good”. One of our nine SDG targets at Techbuyer is contributing 5,000 hours to the education of young people in sustainable digital practices. This target aims to equip the next generation with skills in, and enthusiasm for, green technology. 

However, you don’t always get the opportunity to experience the positive outcomes from setting these targets firsthand. After all - you can’t travel with every donation of IT equipment or personally attend every fundraising event. So, when I got the invitation to travel to the London Stadium to take part in CGI’s Sustainability Careers Festival, I relished the opportunity. 

The event was well attended by different organisations – from a variety of universities to Network Rail and the BBC; we even did our first workshop after the Royal Institute (as in the Christmas lectures) – a tough act to follow! 

Having already delivered a successful (and hugely rewarding) sustainability session at  New College Pontefract earlier this year, we incorporated our popular hard drive teardowns into our day’s plan, using our scheduled workshops to dismantle HDDs and learn about the components and the materials contained within. 

Please see here to view our educational materials on hard drives and the circular economy. 

Keeping children and young people engaged in sustainability can be challenging at times, particularly in an environment as overstimulating as London Stadium. The location of our first workshop - the Arnold Hills room, overlooked the West Ham football pitch. Even I couldn’t resist getting a photo. 

Thankfully, the pull of effectively breaking apart a hard drive was enough to peel young faces away from the windows.  

It’s not just about taking apart equipment  – the workshop covers both the amazing engineering that goes into something as mundane looking as a hard drive, as well as the rare materials used in manufacturing them. If you scale it up, a read/write head moving over the platter is the equivalent of a 747 jet flying 0.14mm above the ground! We also explored the rare materials found in these components, emphasising the importance of reuse and refurbishment to preserve these resources. 

“Techbuyer offered a brilliant insight into what a circular economy is and how they refurbish technology… and ensure assets do not go to waste following the end of what was thought to be their lifespan.” 

“The students were fascinated as to the process behind Techbuyer’s work and gained a great deal with the ‘hands-on’ approach to learning… our students thoroughly enjoyed this experience”  Matthew Howcroft – Teacher at Thomas Tallis School, Greenwich 

I’m confident when I say that the workshops were a great success – not just because I was asked some really searching questions about technology (I have never been called “sir” so much in my entire life), but also because our team received a round of applause after each session. 

We were later called on to perform a third, unscheduled workshop (by popular demand) in order to accommodate another school that wanted to attend one of our sessions. 

For those that couldn’t attend the hard drive teardowns we had another piece of kit on show – the “exploded laptop”. By “exploded” I mean we had an almost completely dismantled laptop showing each of the parts labelled individually. I realise it seems as if we just enjoy taking things apart for the sake of it, but this also served another purpose – showing the value of reusing components. 

If you were to scan through eBay (as we did) and locate any number of ‘non-working’ laptops you can find a multitude of them for next to nothing in value. On the other hand, if you take out the memory, the motherboard, the touch screen and so on, they have considerable resale value. To illustrate this, we ran a ‘play your cards’ right style higher or lower guessing game on the total value of the parts if you sold all the working components successfully. 

Many students were so surprised to learn that something selling for as little as £5 could yield around £500 when successfully harvested for parts. I will add that we did not advocate for any students to take apart their family computer in order to sell the components!  

Next to this were a series of flash cards enabling the pupils to quiz each other on a number of facts concerning computer components, energy use and sustainable technology – for example, did you know the first computer was the same size as 40 king size beds or that in 2022 we generated the equivalent of 2,500 Statues of Liberty in e-waste weight?  

Someone must have liked the flash cards a bit too much: one set seemingly went missing during the event and never came back (if you are the new owner of the cards – I hope you know all the answers off by heart now). 

In summary: If you get the opportunity to contribute to the education of young people in your career – take it! Events like this are one of the most rewarding parts of my job – the progress made towards one of our SDG targets is just the icing on top. 

 

Here are the Quiz Cards we used on the stand: 

Quiz-cards-sus.pdf 

Quiz-cards-energy.pdf 

Quiz-cards-tech.pdf