Techbuyer Attend the CGI Sustainability and Sports Careers Festival

Techbuyer was invited to The Etihad in Manchester to play a part in our second CGI event. We were also fortunate enough to be invited to a CGI Sustainable careers festival at the Olympic stadium in London in May. The team was excited for another opportunity to work with CGI, as well as continuing to build towards our Sustainable Development Goal of spending 5,000 hours educating young people. The event was attended by over 1,600 students, making it one of the largest educational events we have ever attended.

 

Travelling to the 53,400 seater stadium in the early morning of the 8th of May in a van filled with screwdrivers, hard drives and our infamous ‘exploded laptop’ were sustainability committee members James Buckley, Alan Fisher and Becca Henshelwood.

Upon arrival the team was greeted by CGI and Manchester City FC staff and shown to the main conference hall – a double floored circular room flanked by stands manned by everything from BBC Sport to BIFFA waste management, as well as the Army and Royal Navy

One of the most popular stand activities, as was the case in London, was the aforementioned ‘exploded laptop’. In order to illustrate the financial benefits of component level part harvesting, our display included a fully dismantled laptop for which the value of the parts had been researched. The display included a higher or lower game on the resale value of everything from the motherboard to the chassis and screws. Students were amazed to find out that a machine listed for as little as £50 has parts with a total value of over £450.

It's not just about the monetary value of equipment though, the team also encouraged students to look at IT reuse through the lens of environmental sustainability – with dwindling availability of the resources used to make our technology, and global e-waste statistics growing year-on-year, the benefits of reuse far exceed the financial.

This was an overarching theme of the hard drive teardowns conducted for students in the afternoon session. Despite catering for a larger group than originally planned, the team managed to deliver our practical course – putting screwdrivers and hard drives in hands to look at the parts that make up one of the more overlooked computer components.

By taking these drives apart students got a hands on lesson on the both the miraculous engineering (drive platters and read/write heads moving nanometers above each other at over 60 mph) and rare materials (particularly the function of Cobalt – a rare earth element) that go into hard drives; the little grey box that is integral to games consoles, computers and streaming services.

Wherever possible, our team will tend to jump at the opportunity to help educate the next generation. Showing young people something new and having the opportunity to have a positive effect on their world view and behaviours is an infinitely rewarding experience. During the event, our team had to adapt to dealing with a much larger student turnout than initially expected, as well as other unexpected challenges on the day. With this being said, the session was well received by the students, and our team are excited to attend the next CGI event and continue having a positive impact on students across the country regarding the hidden value of e-waste.