Our team is good at reuse but there is lots of room for recycling improvement. I was wondering what other teams have done to foster sustainable builds and also for greening the community?
I know of a few teams who buy recycled HDPE. Not sure if it means what its named, but still…recycled. lol
We’re trying to use all the scraps that we make from all polycarb cuts and are currently trying to think of ways to use aluminum shavings from machining.
We recycle a lot of material, why keep practically every scrap longer then a few inches and often find uses for it. Admittedly we mostly do it for monetary reasons though.
We recycle all of our cans, bottles, and paper we use during the year which adds up to quite a lot. We also keep all of our usable scrap materials. We also received a grant for building a solar powered battery charger a few years ago.
Our robot is about 50% recycled BEST parts . . does that count?
We do the usual of recycling our bottles/cans but we also recycle scrap. Separate from that we run ewaste programs to help the community get rid of items they can’t usually easily get on their own. We also accept any and all scrap or old items (TV’s, computers, air conditioners, random industrial equipment) which are either put into ewaste, or are stripped down by us, each appropriate material being recycled or disposed of properly.
It’s really win-win, all the scrap material we end up with actually becomes a substantial source of income. In fact, the student that ran it has often had himself listed as a sponsor on the robot.
Our wheel hubs are recycled aluminum, cast from scrap we had sitting around the metal shop.
Our drive modules are wood, a renewable, biodegradable resource.
And, from all obvious indicators, all shipping to our team is being done by an aged donkey with a penchant for afternoon naps and frequent grazing breaks. That’s why we got our Orbit balls on Friday and will hopefully get our missing KoP parts tommorrow and have yet to see the McMaster order that was supposed to have shipped over a week ago. :rolleyes: That’s okay… we’re far enough behind schedule now that this fits in to our build sequence just fine. It gives me more time to recycle helpful advice to the students like, “yes, the aluminum *is *hot when it comes off the belt sander.”
Jason
As you can imagine, Team 1501 recycles of all our aluminum scrap.
Maybe First could implement a mini Leeds certification requirement next year…
That is one of the three ‘R’ - reduce, recycle, reuse
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.
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.
.
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
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)
See you there Ed?
I hope so. We have to get our ducks in a row and find some money.
Ed
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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