How can we get other groups involved?

Collection of monitors in the old 'Community House'.

Monitors are plentiful and take up lots of room. They are also the most difficult part of a computer system to dispose of with some sort of ecological responsibility.

We have 4-6 students running the recycle scheme who meet for about 3 hours per week to do this work and learning. My experience with the project to date indicates that the job seems to be bigger than what we can handle. The old Community House used to run the recycle scheme making use of 'work for the dole' people. They could contribute about 15 hours per week to this and so a lot more could get done. I think that we need to work out a way for other groups, outside of Grant High School, to become involved.

We will be ruthless - storage is a big problem for us.

'Old Community House' - lots of old boxes and components.

I reckon that we need to bring in a skip and be fairly ruthless with what is kept and what is not.

The biggest problem that we have at Grant High School with running the recycle scheme is storage space. We can not afford to make our problem worse. I reckon that a few volunteers could sort this out with me one Sunday afternoon.

Old Community House

Old Community House

I have just been done to the old 'Community House' to look at the remnants of the computer recycle scheme that used to operate from there. The house got into some sort of difficulty and has been closed down for a while. Anglican Community Care will now be running the Community House.

As it turns out they are our partners in the 'Community Computer Recycle' (CCR) Scheme. People can apply to Anglican Community Care for a computer through our scheme. They process the requests and we do the recycling, in a nutshell.

There are three rooms of computers, boxes, monitors and parts. We need to sort this out and work out what is useful and what is not.

Guarding privacy with donated computers

Organisations and individuals may have some concerns relating to protecting privacy. To assist with this we have developed a process for processing all donated computers.

Students have participated and responded very responsibly to making improvements to this process.

When donated computers arrive for the recycle scheme we

• store them until our next lesson
• boot them to BIOS to determine specifications
• If the hard drive is of a useful size we use a program to over write the data on the disk.
• If the hard drive is not of a useful size we remove the hard drive and physically drill a hole through it to render it useless

Thanks to one of our students for doing the research to find a program for erasing hard disks.
The program that we use to over write the data on the disk is "Active@ KillDisk FREE version"

http://www.killdisk.com/features.htm

We welcome feedback to make this process better.