Re: Building Green... What are teams doing?
 

We are using packaging from materials we ordered as functional parts of our machine this year rather than throwing them away.

We also prototyped using pizza boxes from an evening meeting snack...

Re: Building Green... What are teams doing?
 

We often give our scraps to our maintenance department because they always find uses for them. Once they even took some of our scrap aluminum and made it into a drill bit. Also we use our maintenance department's scraps too.

Also we recycle all of the cardboard, paper, cans and bottles that we have build up throughout the year. Everything really adds up.

We also give a lot of our metal shavings and wood shavings to the art department because they will use them for projects instead of hacing to buy actual metal powders.

Re: Building Green... What are teams doing?
 

HDPE - High Density PolyEthylene - is a fairly inexpensive, general purpose plastic, easily recognizable as milk jugs or laundry detergent bottles. It is very recyclable, and can be found in park benches, winter coat linings, and even in home centers as plastic wood (for decks). A discussion on its uses in robots can be found here.


811 has been recycling our endless supply of build season soda cans for years, as well as paper, cardboard, assorted aluminum, and the occasional computer.

Re: Building Green... What are teams doing?
 

We utilize CAD (cardboard aided design) which is a way to get a second use out of many pieces of packaging used to ship our parts.

Also high school where we build has a fuel cell that offsets a portion of the building's electrical load.

Yeah it shameless promotion because we (the sponsor most of the mentors works for) build these fuel cells along with mony other green energy products including Geothermal power plants and microturbine based systems that also heat and cool the building (one of the schools that is part of RAGE has one). We also have a division that does LEED certification.

Glad to see this brought up but I have a huge recommendation for events this year. Don't give paper handouts in the pits at competition. We've all seen the floor and trash bins littered with them after the competition and most of them get immediatly tossed away. My reccommendation is don't make them to begin with. We've tried spreading the word on this before because its so wasteful, but this year we will be displaying a sign in our pit that advertises the fact we won't accept any handouts and contribute to continuing this wasteful problem.

Re: Building Green... What are teams doing?
 

We try as hard as we can to reuse old material, without going as far as scrapping old robots, when prototyping or partaking in other build projects.

Much of our recycling besides material reuse is generally for fundraising purposes. Lately, we have received donations of scrap electrical components and other metal scrap from local companies. The copper, aluminum, steel, and brass is separated, and taken to be scrapped and recycled.

A longer team tradition of ours has been our summer can and bottle drives, which we hold a few times every summer. These always raise high community interest, and raise a great amount of bottles and cans which end up supporting the team a good amount. The way I see it, it's better the cans go to a good cause and get recycled than go in a landfill somewhere