A Bicycle-Powered Recycling System for Electronic Waste

Electronic, or e-waste, is quickly becoming a global scourge. Tens of millions of tons of it ends up being exported, often illegally, to countries in the developing world, particularly in Asia and Africa. These countries often don’t have the capacity to properly recycle it. And that means in places like Ghana, for example, you often see teenagers and young adults burning computer wires in order to get at the valuable copper within. That burning creates a host of health and environmental problems.

But now, one design school graduate in Britain has decided to try to tackle the problems of burning copper wire. He’s created a bike-powered recycling system called Esource. The World’s Clark Boyd writes about this in his latest column for the BBC Future website.

Watts calls his invention Esource, and it is a wonder of simplicity that he dreamed up after witnessing first-hand the dire working conditions at the Agbogbloshie dump for himself. Watts tells me that he knew he had to create “a system that’s as cheap as possible, and that didn’t require much infrastructure.”

The first challenge was finding a cheap and reliable power source. He knew no one would want to pay the ongoing costs of running, say, a generator that powered some wire-stripping machine. He looked around, and then it hit him. “Everyone out there has a bicycle.”

The bike powers two different machines that help separate the copper from the plastic coating.

First, you use a shredder that Watts specifically designed using materials available in local workshops. You feed the plastic-coated copper wires into the shredder, and the bits get ground up, smaller and smaller, until they fall through a sieve at the bottom. “That,” says Watts, “guarantees that the copper and plastic are no longer stuck together.”

Then, you use a second machine, which Watts says was inspired by gold-panning technologies. “It has a rotating wheel with water being pumped around it,” says Watts. As you pedal, water is pumped into the spinning wheel. Then you put the small bits of copper and plastic into it. The different weights of the particles, driven by the spiral, mean that “the plastic washes out, and you’re left with a pile of copper.” Read more >>

And here’s a video: