Current Projects

Sustainable E-Waste Design Competition

During the Spring 2009 semester, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) students were challenged to create appealing, useful products from e-waste. Participants were encouraged to enroll in a School of Art and Design course on sustainability and e-waste issues (ARTD 391/591) taught by industrial design professor William Bullock. Students in this class conducted an e-waste collection on campus to gather unused CPUs, monitors, keyboards, mice, printers, scanners and cell phones as fodder for design competition projects. Educational goals for the students included learning about ways to re-use e-waste for new and productive means, exploring ideas for how to address e-waste problems, and contributing to the body of knowledge that advances the practice of environmentally responsible product design for current and future computing technology products.

Participants worked in groups of no more than five people, and their creations were displayed during a public competition event, held April 16, 2009 on the UIUC Quad. Eighty-one students from various disciplines, divided into 21 teams, competed in the contest, which awarded $15,000 in tuition support and other prizes. Judges included representatives from the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center; the Chicago Center for Neighborhood Technology; Dell Inc.; the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Bureau of Energy and Recycling; Microsoft Corp.; Wal-Mart Stores Inc.; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; and West Monroe Partners LLC, Chicago.

For more information on the class and competition, visit the Sustainable E-waste Design Competition web site or contact William Bullock at 217-265-0873.

For links to press coverage of the competition, see the Sustainable Electronics Initiative (SEI) Press Coverage page.

For images from the collection event and competition, see the SEI Photo Gallery.