Pontefract College

At Techbuyer, we like to make as big an impact as we possibly can, and the targets we set against the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2019 were no exception. We recently achieved our fourth target - keeping 4 million kilos of technology out of landfill – no small ask, that’s a lot of kit.

But when it comes to our target of spending 5,000 hours educating young people in Sustainable Technology there are different challenges: how can you persuade a generation who are so used to replacing their tech every few years to reuse it or consider the environmental challenges of these practices?

Following on from the success of our trip to the National Museum of Computing and the Harrogate Climate Action Festival, three members of Techbuyer’s Sustainability Committee (James Buckley, Paula Shrimpton and Jack Whitaker) attended the Green Employer Conference at New College Pontefract to rise to these challenges.

Remembering that our favourite lessons at school were the ones where we were taking things apart (or blowing things up) and with how engaged students were in the laptop teardowns at the NMOC, we decided to let our students dismantle some Hard Drives.

So how does dismantling a hard drive teach you anything about Sustainability in Tech?

Hard Drives are, on the face of things, are fairly mundane pieces of kit: they’re silver boxes with a circuit board screwed to the back. We routinely replace them and we’re in the midst of sending them to obsolescence (to live with the floppy disk) as Solid State memory develops larger capacities at a lower price.

It’s very easy to overlook the fact that they were an amazing piece of precision engineering: if you scale it up, the read/write head of a hard drive moving over the platter is the equivalent of a 747-jet flying 14mm above the ground. Magnetised metallic grains are converted to Electrical signals which ultimately make up the zeroes and ones that are the building blocks of all data. When you learn about the intricacies of a Hard Drive, you begin to appreciate its value.

If appreciating the design is the first step to understanding the value of tech, the next step is understanding the resources that make it. Cobalt, an important ingredient of the magnetic platter (the ‘disk’ in ‘hard disk’) is a Critical Raw Material – a mineral that whilst strategically important for our transition to greener technologies, has high risk associated with supply (you may have heard of the human rights issues surrounding Cobalt mining in DRC).

 As well as losing valuable materials like Cobalt when we send our tech to the dump we also covered some of the environmental impacts associated with e-waste, including damage to nature and human health.   

Once we’d established why we need to keep our Hard Drives out of landfill, we finished off the session discussing the best practice for the Tech we have – the Circular Economy. For example, imagine you own a video game company, and you need to upgrade your computers – what’s the best way to do this while minimising waste? How can we apply the waste hierarchy to this situation?

Finally: the most important question: did the students enjoy themselves (and learn something)?

It’s not always easy to read a room of 16- to 17-year-olds: not least when they are busy trying to pull the platter out of a hard drive. Things that are amazing to me now (the fact that we made 3D printed handles for our screwdrivers) can be seen as mundane by a generation who don’t remember life before Google. Getting feedback from the students was essential, so what did they think?

 “I hadn’t really thought about the components before ... it just goes to show how much can be reused”.

“That was really interesting- I've not done that before”

“10 out of 10”

If you’d like to have a look at the content we made for the conference please see here