Building Green... What are teams doing?

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by vamfun

Our team is good at reuse

That is one of the three 'R' - reduce, recycle, reuse

Originally Posted by vamfun

recycling improvement

Akash mentioned the aluminum shavings. Easy answer, just recycle them. There are several auto manufacturers that run zero or near zero to the landfill operations. It is easier for them because they can set up processes to recycle metals, glass, and plastics a whole lot easier than a bunch of kids can.

Originally Posted by vamfun

also for greening the community?

I am compelled to make a few suggestions.

a) work at your local volunteer electronics recycling day, or local river / lake cleanup or adopt a mile. These are simple things that anyone with any level of talent can do.

b) build a machine to cleanup. this is where things get really tough.

Remembering that FIRST is like "WWF for smart people" - It is the FIRST'ers of the world that will be the future engineers working on solving a lot of the problems that Dean has outlined.

To illustrate the point - we are trying to build a robot to do some environmental cleanup. It has to be tough enough to get bounced around on a ship's deck all day and dropped 100 meters into seawater, all day, and all night. Thankfully we don't have the 120 lb weight limitation. See "Osborne Reef"

It gives us something to do all year round. We can use it to promote FIRST, connecting what you learn in FIRST with a real life application. It give us a way to interest a whole new realm of people into getting interested into why FIRST and the promotion of STEM education is cool.

And you can also take some time off and build a NURC machine and go visit 842 this summer in Phoenix.

I can't make the next point STRONGLY ENOUGH !!

The average citizen reads about, and talks about problems.

Engineers SOLVE problems. IMHO FIRST students should be thinking about how to take all the really cool stuff they learn, in engineering, science, fundraising, project management, etc to solve a real life problem. There is no shortage of problems to solve.

We chose picking up trash from water because it exists everywhere, it is 'ignored' by everyone, it hit's a lot of hot buttons when presenting to the public, and it potentially parallels a lot of the types of problems that you see in FRC competition. And it is a REALLY tough problem that needs addressing.

a 5 minute mini-documentary. this is the one we are using to promote FIRST internationally, on satellite television with our team partner here

a little self promotion - the website

I apologize if this sounds like self promotion but it is something I'm passionate about, all this FIRST stuff !!!!!

While I'm here is anyone going to be in Singapore May 6th and 7th ? There is an opportunity to present at ShipTek 2009 if we can get someone there. We don't have the time or funds to do it.
.

[Wetzel]

Having now lived in England for a while, I can say the US in general has a lot of catch up to do on everyday being green. Not saying it is perfect here, but the level of awareness and practical solutions used is much higher here on a whole.

Wetzel

[MrForbes]

We're building our robot mostly of wood, and locally available materials, and keeping machining to a minimum. I like to think it's because we're concerned about the environment, but it's more likely because we're cheap and lazy!

(saving money and labor, by carefull design and material selection, is a major goal of engineers who work for companies that are expected to make a profit)

Originally Posted by ebarker

And you can also take some time off and build a NURC machine and go visit 842 this summer in Phoenix.

See you there Ed?

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by squirrel

See you there Ed?

I hope so. We have to get our ducks in a row and find some money.

Ed

[Mike AA]

Over half our machined materials come from metals bought at the local recycling center. At the end of the year we recycle most of the aluminum shavings and my dad makes a run to the recycle center a couple times a year with scraps from projects throughout the year. Between all the copper and aluminum we recycle close to 5 tons.

-Mike

[qwertyuiop[]\]

we use our leftover aluminum shavings to make thermite and then use that to melt down the rest of our scrap.

jk. we actually reuse most of our aluminum parts. we have only bought 8020 once and we dont keep our old robots on display, we scrap them for parts and gear boxes. recently the only things we have disposed of were some extremly old steel kitbot parts from like a decade ago and old control system stuff.

[Rob]

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...

[GillSt.Bernards]

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.