Recycling Your Old Computer
This case is best for groups.
Background
If you have recently purchased a new computer, you might be wondering what to do with the old one. According to “Millions of Obsolete PCs Enter Waste Stream” by Kim S. Nash in ComputerWorld, some 100 million computers are retired each year in the United States. Nearly 75 percent end up in closets, 15 percent go to landfills, and 10 percent are reused or recycled, a Tufts University researcher has found.
The federal program Computers for Learning donates government computers to schools. Similar programs donate computers to other kinds of nonprofit organizations. For links to many such programs, use a search engine to search for “computer recycling.”
Your Assignment
Form small groups; then decide how to split up the tasks listed here. The members of your group will be working on a project about recycling personal computers. To complete this assignment, perform the following tasks:
Study Chapter 13 on recommendation reports.
Study the ComputerWorld article “Millions of Obsolete PCs Enter Waste Stream” for a basic understanding of the issues involved in computer recycling: the organizations that already coordinate such efforts, the kinds of equipment that are useful to schools, the tax advantages that result from donating, and so forth.
Find out whether your college or university currently has a program to donate its used computers to nonprofit organizations. Some colleges and universities have such programs or have programs in which students fix and upgrade computers and then pass them along to organizations. The computer-
If there is a program at your college or university, interview the people responsible to determine whether they could use assistance in publicizing it. Perhaps they could use some publicity in the form of a page for the school’s website or perhaps a flyer or brochure. If there is no program at your college or university, try to determine whether the computer-
Prepare a 3,000-