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2009 Project for Recycling & Donating Used Computers

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In order to meet the consumers’ needs, the information industry keeps producing products of higher quality and with newer functions, which shortens the life-cycles of products at the same time. Taking the personal computer as an example, the product’s commercial life is only about 4 to 6 years. A great amount of scrap is often discarded and gives rise to serious pollution problems. According to the 2008 “Report on the Investigation of the Digital Divide,” prepared by the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission of the Executive Yuan, the digital divide often results in a gap between the poor and the wealthy. Thus, the essential goal of this project was to bridge the digital divide by recycling and refurbishing the used computers and donating them to lower income students. After running the project for several years, making it much better with more benefits for those children in need has always been the key point. The project focused on the lower income students in rural areas and minority groups and it aimed to donate 350 refurbished computers. The donation of used computers might help those students gain easier access to information technology, and might also achieve the other goal of reducing the pollution caused by information products. The content of the project included the jobs of recycling, reassembling, donating and promotion. As a social project, it has been modified to make it a better one based on our previous valuable operating experience. Besides, the research also showed that around 10,000 lower income students need such used computers. With the unleashing of the financial tsunami at the end of 2008, we may predict that more and more families will want to have used computers. Hence, this project should move forward to a brand-new platform that combines the resources from government, enterprises and the general public step by step.
Keyword
used computers, refurbished computers, recycling, digital divide
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