Last week I got an email from Tekserve, a local Mac repair shop, about an e-recycling event they were holding in conjunction with the Lower East Side Ecology center. I had a box full of old power adapters, obsolete '90s cell phones, various electronic bric-a-brac and even a Zip Drive I'd been meaning to get rid of, so I didn't need Tekserve's offer of a free MacBook Air raffle ticket to sweeten the deal. When dropping my stuff off, it was heartening to see the amount of people that showed up, and all of these huge industrial laundry bins filled with computers, monitors, and electronic junk that otherwise would've gone into a landfill.

The University of Illinois is taking e-recyling one step further with its International E-waste Design Competition 2010:

The spirit of this competition is to prompt the industrialized world to dialogue about product designs for environmentally responsible green computing and entertainment. The goals of this competition are to learn about ways to re-use E-Waste for new and productive means, explore your own ideas for how to address E-Waste problems and contribute to the body of knowledge that advances the practice of environmentally responsible product design for current and future computing technology products.

We invite you to create a broad range of design concepts and innovations for technology products that demonstrate fresh approaches and responsible solutions for green computing technologies. Engineering, design, sustainability, or business knowledge will be helpful but not required for success in this competition.

Registration opens January 31st, but in the meantime you can bone up on the competition requirements here.

via dexigner