A greener computer usually means components that require less energy, and are run by alternative power sources like hand cranks and solar collectors.  One enterprising inventor has come up with a way to make a green computer out of cardboard.

Greener Gadgets has a yearly competition for, you guessed it, greener gadgets.  The entries range from devices to help you save energy in your whole house, to gadgets that will teach children about green technology, and greener computers.

Brenden Macaluso, of the United States submitted the entry called Recompute.  You supply your own monitor and keyboard (in other words reuse your old monitor and keyboard).  The rest of the components are inside the corrugated cardboard case.

Corrugated cardboard is important because that is the ventilation system for the computer.  Furthermore, this means that the case is recyclable.  Less energy and materials are needed to produce the case.  Metal and plastic plus all of the energy and processes that go into initially manufacturing them and then molding them into a case are eliminated reducing the amount of non recyclable elements in the computer.

“Recompute uses only three major electronic components: A motherboard with processor & memory, power supply, and a hard drive.”  This is clearly not made to be a gaming computer but it will be excellent as a basic workhorse.

There are eight USB ports for adding any additional hardware that you might need.  Eight USB ports should be plenty to cover flash drives, external disk drives and mobile gadget synchronization.  It also looks as if it has a dedicated printer port and dedicated keyboard and mouse, audio and monitor connections.

Upgrading internal components would be easy as would recycling the case and components.  The components, of course, need to be properly recycled because of their toxicity.  The ease of removing them from the case should make this easier.

As more and more low energy and low toxicity components become available, this computer can become even more environmentally sound and easy to recycle.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2009 at 10:45 pm under Green Technology.

Read more entries by Susan Wilson.
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