Anyone who's ever tried to recycle a laptop or other electronics knows that it's a lot more effort than rinsing out your beer bottles before taking them down to the bottle depot. Aiming to solve this problem, a group of students at Stanford have developed a laptop they believe will facilitate easier-than-ever recycling of the machine's parts.
Dubbed the Bloom laptop, the machine comes apart without the use of any tools. That's right, while the folks at iFixit and other teardown enthusiasts are busy acquiring 'spudgers' and special screwdrivers that will enable them to dissect the latest electronics, owners of the Bloom laptop wouldn't need a single tool to take apart the laptop. In fact, they could disassemble the machine in a couple of minutes.
The project was enough to net the students Autodesk's has Inventor of the Month award for October. AutoDesk reports that in 2005, 1.9 to 2.2 million tons of electronics became obsolete and only 345,000 to 379,000 tons were recycled. The Bloom laptop can be disassembled in just two minutes, without tools and in just 10 steps. By comparison, a commercially available laptop takes about 45 minutes to disassemble, requires three different tools and can involve as many as 120 steps.
While the main purpose of the project is impressive enough, the modular nature of the laptop allowed the team to incorporate another cool feature: They made the already-removable keyboard and mouse wireless for improved ergonomics.
Check out the video below to see how the whole thing works.
