Sustainable Engineering report
There are many definitions of sustainability. One of the best known is from the Brundtland Report, 1987, which says that sustainable development is that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” In practice it is almost impossible to do this in the developed world, where most peoples’ life style is unsustainable. For engineers in particular, it is difficult as their brief often commits them to unsustainable projects.Some examples of extremely unsustainable operations might include:
- Drainage and farming in the English fens, leading to peat wastage and so the lowering of the land below sea level
- Cutting and burning of rainforest, to plant crops which leads to irreversible loss of primary tree cover
Source:http://www7.caret.cam.ac.uk/sustainability.htm
Sustainable engineering is defined by the Centre for Sustainable Engineering as “Engineering technologies and services which deliver greater resource productivity or efficiency and fewer emissions of hazardous substances and/or emissions presenting lower hazards.”
The ‘sustainability’ project I have decided to look at it the “one laptop per child” project. It is being run by a non-profit organization that aims to bring cheap mobile computers to the children of the world’s poorest countries. This laptop would be used as a learning tool for the world’s poorest children living in its most remote environments with little access to teaching materials. The project capitalizes on the ability to display information and to sort thousands of pages of text to make it a “visual text book”. These computers are a redesign of the idea of the modern computer, completely modified for the specifications of world children making it, “form and function; a flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine” (OLPC, 2007, para 1) The software on the device will all be open source, with the operating system being a modified version of the very popular Linux distro, Fedora core and all other applications are specially designed be less processor hungry and easy to use for children.
According to some sources, the project could have send out as many as 100 millions of units around the world within a matter of a year (Ryan Naraine, 2006, para 1). This report asks the questions, is it a viable replacement for conventional teaching materials? Has it build durable enough to face the demands remote rural environments? Could the money used to create these devices be better used? This report will study the technical specification of the devices and try to put them in a real world context.
This project hopes to solve the problem that is becoming known as the “digital divide” (Paul Mobbs ,2002 para 25), as third world counties which are less economically developed, which normally means a poorer standard of education and less implementation of technology. This give the people in these counties less chance to increase the their quality of life and get out of provity. The laptops are to be used in remote places where it is not easy to get text books and trained staff to teach children. As the screen can be used to display moving images and different text, it can be used as multiply texts books in one, with the ability to watch dvds and access the internet, opening up a whole vast wealth of information.
One of the biggest problems of creating a device such as is to try and make a power-efficient design and have this efficiency to be cheap to make. Laptops are powered by batteries which feed energy to the hardware, when the battery runs out of power it then needs to be recharged. As lots of devices will be placed in remote area which may not have a cheap/well placed electrical energy system charge the battery. Creating a cheap and easy way of charge the battery in such areas is one of the first challenges that the designers would have to deal with so has be created with the ability to be charged in many forms. It can be used by the standard plug like a normal laptop but it also has other option. It can be charged by a built-in human powered generator or can be charged using a car battery. As it the battery doesn’t have much effect if it is recycled, the battery can be powered by renewable source, makes it very environmently friendly and sustainable.
Lots of countries have already shown interest in the technology as a text book replacement. As it is a replacement for text book, it means that less books have to be printed, meaning that less trees have to cut down to create these the paper used in the book. Leaving more trees standing is good for the environment too. Creating the laptop not completely environmently sound, as large manufacturing sites are needed to create the components. But if these devices work as designed then they should last much longer than a text book as it more durable and can be updated over the internet.