Pretty waste – and what to make out of it

Not all e-waste is appealing. But some parts of it, once dismantled and cleaned, can become really nice design products.

A regular old computer, taken apart until only the casing is left. By then, you will have taken out all drives, like CD, DVD or floppy disk drives, the hard disk drive, the power supply, and the motherboard, equipped with a variety of elements, such as graphic or sound cards, a button-cell battery, aluminium heat sink with a fan upon the CPU or processor, capacitors of all sizes… The metal or plastic case can be cut into pieces and connected with bookbinding linen. Adding a ring binding mechanism, you get a fancy and durable notebook.

Graphic or video cards from PCs, dismantled as mentioned above, make nice desktop clocks. What you need to do is mount the printed circuit board onto an aluminium heat sink which serves as a base or foot, and add a commercial clockwork (on the back) and pointers on the front. Completely depleted circuit boards can become notebooks, or jewellery…

Cables and wires, in all dimensions and different colours: what would you think can be made out of them? Here, the thin coloured wires from the inside of an old printer cable were combined to become a matching necklace and bracelet, and pieces of printed circuit board turn up again as rings and earrings.

Dismantling a whole washing machine is not the easiest task, but it’s feasible, with the right tools and some effort. The drum, made out of stainless steel, needs some thorough cleaning, before becoming a new and shiny piece of furniture. And the bull’s eye of a front loader washing machine, which consists of heat resistant borosilicate glass, can gain a new life as a decorative fruit or salad bowl, after cleaning, and sandblasting whatever design you decided to plot out from the computer.