Why tackling e-waste is mission critical for the data storage industry

Why tackling e-waste is mission critical for the data storage industry, Ban-Seng Teh, TechRadar.com, October 25, 2023

The manufacturing sector is rarely associated with sustainability best practices, and arguably for good reason. A recent study from IPCC found manufacturers account for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Many still all too often make products without a plan for what happens when they reach end of life. From a technology hardware perspective, electronics no longer in use are far too often thrown away. In the UK alone, an estimated 2 million tonnes of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) items are discarded by consumers and companies every year.

According to IDC, the Global DataSphere is expected to generate 291ZB of data in 2027. Finding ways to recycle the world’s hard drive waste has therefore become a particularly pressing concern for the data storage industry. We have a critical part to play in operating more sustainably, and there are multiple ways to achieve this.

Delete, don’t destroy

When a hard drive comes to the end of its life, many believe shredding is the only way to make confidential or sensitive information completely irretrievable. According to the Circular Drive Initiative, millions of storage devices are being shredded each year, even though they could be reused. Of course, data and intellectual property must be protected and adhere to global data privacy laws. However, disposal and shredding are not the only answer, and they are certainly not the most sustainable approach.

Businesses should not preclude safe data deletion. Many hard drives now have built-in encryption and erase capabilities, which means data can be digitally wiped through data sanitization. With the right technology, this can take literally a matter of seconds, and lead to redeployment into the market for many years.

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Why Should Small Businesses Adopt Sustainability As A Core Business Strategy?

Kumar Vijayendra, Forbes.com

If you own or manage a small business, one of the most strategic decisions you should consider is to realign your business strategy and objectives around sustainability. The reason extends beyond altruism and delves into the long-term survival and success of your business. Embracing sustainability in core business strategy can help bring operational efficiency, contribute to daily cost savings, enhance brand reputation, improve customer loyalty, and increase the valuation of your business.

It’s common for leaders to feel they are too busy to spend time on sustainability, that their finances run too thin, or that they are too small to cause an impact. I want to allay those perceptions by presenting a five-factor analysis of why businesses should make this strategic paradigm shift as soon as possible.

1. Customer Base

A business exists for its customers. Whether you are in a B2C or B2B business, the way your customers relate to your business can be transformed by adopting sustainability as your core strategy.

If you have been in a B2C business for some time, you’ve likely already felt the impact of a change in your customer base. Small businesses now cater to a larger share of young people (Gen Z), whose values and purchasing preferences are very focused on sustainable practices and products. If you are a B2B small business serving major corporations, you may have already witnessed your clients demanding or preferring sustainable practices and operations by building it into their supplier codes. There are also a higher number of businesses that wish to partner with more sustainable organizations.

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Island ecosystem once destroyed by rats increases biomass by 2,000%

Lloyd Lee, YahooNews.com, October 1, 2023

Redonda, a small, uninhabited Caribbean island that is part of the commonwealth of Antigua and Barbuda, is on the path to recovering its native ecosystem after being destroyed by invasive species nearly a century ago.

The tiny island of Redonda, about a mile long, was formerly a haven for several species of seabirds.

Its attraction, particularly to birds, such as Brown Boobies and Masked Boobies, made the island a rich source of guano — or seabird excrement — which could be turned into fertilizer and gunpowder.

In the 19th century, the British government deployed more than 100 miners to begin extracting several tons of guano per year, according to Earth Island Journal.

Humans deserted the island around the 1930s, but the mining operations left behind invasive species, mainly domestic goats and stowaway black rats, that wreaked havoc on the island’s ecosystem.

Soon, the island became a barren landscape, earning the nickname “the rock” from adjacent locals, BBC reported.

“Much like they have done elsewhere in the world, the rats and goats contributed to the deforestation and desertification of Redonda and are blamed for the extinction of the endemic skink and iguana, as well as the extirpation of the Antiguan burrowing owl on the island,” according to the Environmental Awareness Group (EAG), an Antigua and Barbuda NGO. “By 2012, the ecosystem was so severely degraded that even the feral goats were starving to death.”

In 2016, environmental groups such as EAG launched restoration efforts to bring back the local plant life and animal species native to the island.

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rStream to pilot AI-driven recycling technology with UMass Dining Services

Deanne Toto, RecyclingToday.com, October 2, 2023

A robotics company focused on waste management and recycling is rolling out a pilot program with UMass Dining Services to test the ability of its artificial intelligence (AI) to identify in real-time the material in the waste stream.

Ian Goodine and Ethan Walko, rStream founders, will present their technology, dubbed AuditPRO, Oct. 17 during an invite-only session at 4:30 in the UPub. However, members of the press and the community can join a demonstration at 5:30 p.m. in the Lincoln Campus Center.

Goodine and Walko began investigating solutions for waste in 2020 during their mechanical engineering senior design project at UMass Amherst. During their master’s studies, they formally co-founded rStream, further developed the idea through the I-Corps @ UMass program of the Institute of Applied Life Sciences, which helps students and others on campus turn their technological discoveries into real-world products and services, and sought out grant funding from the National Science Foundation to support their continued R&D.

“The big problem in recycling is people just don’t put stuff in the right bin,” Goodine says. This often leads to capture rates of only 30 percent and contamination in recycling bins.

The computer vision and robotic innovations in rStream’s technology will take the guesswork away from consumers, according to a news release from UMass Amherst.

“The world rStream wants to make is one where consumers put everything in a single bin and automation does the rest,” Goodine says. “Instead of 30 percent, this technology could ensure 90 to 100 percent of recyclables are being picked up by waste haulers and made into new products.”

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The gold jewelery made from old phones

Anna Turns, BBC.com, September 5, 2023

E-waste is mounting. Now the UK Royal Mint has found a new way to extract the precious metals hidden in laptops and phones to reduce our reliance on raw materials.

Through security, equipped with a pair of safety glasses and a white lab coat, I’m taken behind the scenes at the Royal Mint near Cardiff, South Wales – a place that’s world-renowned for making billions of coins for more than 30 nations. For two years, the Royal Mint, the UK’s official coin producer, has been developing a mysterious new way to recover metals from electronic waste.

As I walk into her small demo laboratory, Hayley Messenger, a chemist specialising in sustainable precious metals, explains why nothing here is labelled: “Everything is a secret!” she says, pouring a ‘”magic green solution” into a one-litre-capacity (35oz) glass flask of fragmented circuit boards.

She and a team of chemists and chemical analysts, together with Canadian start-up Excir, have invented and patented a clean, energy-efficient way which they claim extracts 99% of gold from the printed circuit boards found inside discarded laptops and old mobile phones. Later this year, the Royal Mint is opening a new multi-million-pound factory which will be able to process 90 tonnes of circuit boards per week once fully operational, recovering hundreds of kilogrammes of gold every year.

When the luminous mixture starts to fizz, Messenger screws the lid on, then places the flask on a tumbling machine to shake the contents. In just four minutes, any gold dissolves and leaches out into the liquid.

“This all happens at room temperature and it’s very quick,” says Messenger who explains that this chemical solution gets reused up to 20 times, with the concentration of dissolved gold increasing each time.

When another mystery solution is added, the gold becomes solid metal again. This powder is filtered out and melted down in a furnace into thumbnail-sized nuggets. These nuggets can then be crafted into pendant necklaces, earrings and cufflinks. But the real beauty of these recycled precious metals lies in the scalability of this super streamlined chemical process.

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Worms with spider genes spin silk tougher than bulletproof Kevlar

Katherine Bourzac, Science.org, September 20, 2023

Milestone advance in silkworms could lead to commercial applications in medicine and textiles

Spider silk is stretchy, strong, and tough. But genetically engineering a more cooperative organism to produce it has proved elusive. Now, researchers have used gene editing to make silkworms that can spin spider fibers tougher than the Kevlar used in bulletproof vests.

The material, described today in Matter, is “a really high-performance fiber,” says Justin Jones, a biologist who engineers spider silks at Utah State University but who was not involved with the research. It could be used to make lightweight but tough structural materials for fuel-efficient planes and cars, he says, wound dressings for faster healing, and superthin but tough sutures for eye surgeries.

People have been cultivating silkworms for thousands of years, unwinding their cocoons to provide material for textiles. But their silk breaks easily. Spiders have the opposite problem: They make incredible silks, but the arachnids are hard to cultivate. One hundred silkworms can hang around peaceably in a small space, whereas 100 confined spiders will attack one another, until only one or two are left alive.

In an attempt to harness the best of both animals, researchers have tried for years to genetically engineer silkworms to make spider fibers. But spider silk proteins are large, and the correspondingly large genes have been difficult to insert in the genomes of other animals.

So in the new study, Junpeng Mi, a biotechnologist at Donghua University, and colleagues chose to work with a relatively small spider silk protein. Called MiSp, it’s found in Araneus ventricosus, an orb-weaving spider found in East Asia. The scientists used CRISPR to insert MiSp in place of the gene in silkworms that codes for their primary silk protein. But the scientists retained some silkworm sequences in their MiSp gene construct, Mi says, in order to ensure the worm’s internal machinery could still work with the spider protein.

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ITAM influence on cyber risk becoming a factor in credit ratings

ITAM influence on cyber risk becoming a factor in credit ratings, Alex Scroxton, ComputerWeekly.com, August 16, 2023

Credit agency S&P Global Ratings warns that organizations that pay inadequate attention to IT asset management as a factor in their cyber risk management processes may find their creditworthiness takes a dive

IT asset management (ITAM) and its relationship to good cyber security practice and risk management is becoming a vital element in determining an organisation’s ability to obtain credit, and those that lack an appropriate ITAM strategy may find their ratings adversely effected, according to credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Global Ratings.

In its report, Cyber risk insights: IT asset management is central to cyber security, the agency explores how ITAM – defined as the practice of tracking and managing hardware, connected devices, software and networks throughout their lifecycle – is now vital to an organisation’s ability to proactively manage vulnerabilities, respond to cyber incidents and attacks, and minimise their financial impact.

It cites the 2017 breach of personal data on 149 million Brits, Americans and Canadians at fellow credit agency Equifax as a prime example of an incident in which ITAM, or lack thereof, was a decisive factor.

The US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) complaint against Equifax, which ultimately led to a multi-million dollar fine, cited an inability to maintain “an accurate inventory” of its public-facing IT assets that ultimately led to the failure to patch an Apache Struts vulnerability, which a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) actor was able to use to access its systems.

S&P credit analyst Paul Alvarez said: “ITAM is foundational to effective cyber security. Its absence at an organisation can be indicative of flawed cyber risk management and could weigh on our view of an entity’s creditworthiness.”

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Recycling power: vape batteries ‘marketed as disposable’ power e-scooter

Amber Allott, Yahoo UK, August 29, 2023

A recent graduate has managed to build an e-scooter powered by batteries salvaged from so-called disposable vapes, in a bid to make a statement about waste.

Wiltshire special effects graduate Tobiasz Stanford, 23, has managed to power up a £30 scooter he bought off eBay with 80 of the lithium ion batteries – to show disposable vapes are not as expendable as their makers claim.

It was now capable of reaching top speeds of 25km an hour, lasting six miles in a single charge, and can even tackle hills and puddles. Mr Stanford said he uses it every day, and it is “very reliable”.

His scooter had wowed a lot of people, he said, especially when they learned how he had powered it. “The only downfall is that it’s quite noisy, but other than that the performance is crazy.”

A recent graduate has managed to build an e-scooter powered by batteries salvaged from so-called disposable vapes, in a bid to make a statement about waste.

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Made from fungi, this vegan leather can self-heal holes or rips

Jude Coleman, SNExplores.com, August 30, 2023

Leather fabrics can be pricey — so a rip in a favorite jacket or purse might be upsetting. But what if torn leather could repair itself? That can’t happen today. But it might one day — if that jacket is fashioned from a specially prepared fungus.

Scientists shared their recipe for this novel leather in the April 11 issue of Advanced Functional Materials.

Most leather comes from animal hides. But researchers in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, have just fashioned theirs from mycelium (My-SEE-lee-um). It’s the interwoven, thready rootlike structures — hyphae (HI-fee) — made by mushrooms. Normally, these strands spread underground, below a mushroom. There, they absorb nutrients from the dead things the fungus digests, such as logs.

Fungal leather is hardly new. Some companies already use fungi to make leather purses and car seats. These help to satisfy a market for goods made without animal products. But those vegan leathers have always been made in a way that stops the fungus from ever growing again.

The Newcastle team thought it could help those mushroom “roots” retain their ability to regrow by tweaking how they made the leather. And it worked.

It takes a gentle approach

Other producers of fungal leather have kept their methods a secret. The Newcastle team is not doing that. In fact, it has offered a how-to guide for copying its innovation, notes Valeria La Saponara. She’s a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of California, Davis. Those instructions, she says, could inspire other scientists who want to make mushroom materials.

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Gen Z activists just won a first-of-its-kind trial against the state of Montana for violating their right to a clean environment

Matthew Brown, Amy Beth Hanson, and the Associated Press, Fortune.com, August 15 2023

Young environmental activists scored what experts described as a ground-breaking legal victory Monday when a Montana judge said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by allowing fossil fuel development.

The ruling in this first-of-its- kind trial in the U.S. adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change.

If it stands, the ruling could set an important legal precedent, though experts said the immediate impacts are limited and state officials pledged to seek to overturn the decision on appeal.

District Court Judge Kathy Seeley found the policy the state uses in evaluating requests for fossil fuel permits — which does not allow agencies to look at greenhouse gas emissions — is unconstitutional.

It marks the first time a U.S. court has ruled against a government for violating a constitutional right based on climate change, said Harvard Law School Professor Richard Lazarus.

“To be sure, it is a state court not a federal court and the ruling is based on a state constitution and not the U.S. Constitution, but it is still clearly a major, pathbreaking win for climate plaintiffs,” Lazarus wrote in an email.

The judge rejected the state’s argument that Montana’s emissions are insignificant, saying they were “a substantial factor” in climate change. Montana is a major producer of coal burned for electricity and has large oil and gas reserves.

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