Reuse and sharing

In or at the exit to each of the major university hallways, there is an equipment recycling bin or shelf to give and take surplus appliances, furniture, office supplies, equipment, etc. Pictured above is a bin containing: A Dell 1U server of some kind (there were two the day before), some Cisco 2xxx series routers, an old Akai VCR, about 25 drive module sleds, an assortment of rails for 19-inch equipment, keyboards, indicator panels, and assorted server room cables. In sort, around $$$$ of easily portable, easily eBayable pieces are up for grabs in the one bin alone.

Other bin goodies I've noticed but not collected: Powerbook, Canon slide scanner, LaserWriters and various other printers, fax machines, telephones, lamps, most (?) of an HPLC, digital slide viewers, desktop PCs, cell phone batteries, ThinkPad modules, CodeWarrior 2, Harvard Graphics 98, boxes of unopened Nokia cell phone batteries and accessories, etc.

Stuff I've collected for immediate use: Power cables, a desk, a pair of basic routers, two keyboards, one mouse, a few VGA and USB cables, a basic set of cable adapters, a new-in-box office telephone and approximately 50' of telephone cable to secure loads to the bike. Overflowing bins of stuff that no one here wants to reuse appear to be removed approximately once per month, only to be replaced with empty bins that start to fill again the next morning. A few items and components are removed each day, as new old items are given more chances at utility. Sometimes, the components are used in-place, as masks or assists for various artistic endeavors that leave traces of paint and cuttings.

All this is from the non-technical side of the university.

In Canada, some sense about the meaning of accountability would require university staff who dispose of government-funded property to document every asset discarded in its long journey to the landfill. Wages alone would put the cost of handling and documenting each item at at least $0.25, to handle items that go to auction or surplus sales in bulk to recover $1/kg gross (less transportation and further handling costs). In Finland, accountability means that both citizens and people working on behalf of the government are trusted to use their professional and personal judgement about what to dispose of, how to sustainably gain the most value from the resources at hand, and not to abuse the available community resources. It may well be that the bins are being carted off for sale or recycling in the same manner as in Canada, but the lack of administrative overhead enables at least one half of the university's finished goods waste to be diverted toward productive and value-generating uses.

Next week, the student-run storage room of household essentials re-opens a final time this semester to collect or recover reusable items from students and staff as they leave for the summer. In the next three months, the items will be re-bundled to be given to new students arriving in the fall.

Down the hall from my office, there is an open well stocked supply closet with new, partly consumed, and used items. Desks are remarkably un-cluttered since there's no need for everyone to keep separate large local caches of anything other than daily consumables (pens, stickies, notebooks), and because down the hall there are really good staplers, hole punches, document containers, scissors, cutting tools (and all the other crappy office junk that typically frustrates users) for those relatively rare occasions when they're genuinely required.