Eagle Project Idea Help

[SamFire5]

I am having trouble coming up with an idea for my eagle scout project. My original idea is to collect donations of broken and old computers for it to be recycled instead of it being end up at a landfill. In addition, I want to take what i have gathered and get working computer parts and rebuild PC's and donate them to hospitals and donation centers. When I kept thinking about this, I don't think the second one is going to work because mostly all of these computers i will be receiving will be damaged and/or unusable. I also think that just collect computers and sending them off to a e-cycling center isn't good enough. I need help coming up wait a second part to this project.

[Quailman]

One suggestion is to expand it to include CFLs and add a public education portion about the importance of keeping them out of landfills. As we've switched from incandescent bulbs to the more efficient and longer latsing compact flourescent ones, there's been a lack of information about the need to recycle them.

Home Depot accepts CFLs for recycling, but it's not very widely known.

[Bill Pitcher]

Hi Sanfire 5, I have been mentoring Eagle Scout candidates for over 20 years and first I have some questions:
1. Are you going to be "fixing" these old computers or will you be training and directing "others" to do it?
2. Do you know how to clean the hard drives of the donnor's personal information?
3. How will you collect components: set up a drop-off site, collect them like Scouting for Food (i.e. 2 weekends)?
4. Will you be raising the funds to purchase missing components to make a complete package (i.e. tower, key board, mouse, printer, laptop, etc)?
5. What will you do with computers whose OS is outdated and unsuported?

If these "bases" are covered, look to Veterans centers and/or homes to donate completed computer sets, or a "battered woman's shelter" or a children's home, etc. You could run a couple of clinics for senior citizen's living centers while donating computer equipment to the center. You have a good project thought here, so run with it. You'll soon be "Soaring with other Eagles!" Good luck.

[Mrw]

We had a scout do a similar project. The newer stuff was donated to a service that re-builds for shelters, etc. The older stuff went to a place that breaks down the components for recycling.

We scaled back how many homes he was going to deliver flyers to announcing his collection date from our entire town (about 18,000 population) to probably less than half the households and his biggest problem was not having nearly enough truck space for the materials he collected. In maybe 5 hours time, he had two medium size U-hauls totally packed to the ceilings of old electronics.

Apparently lots of people had old stuff they knew should be recycled , but did not know how to throw away!

Another idea would be for you to do the project in a way that your troop could continue to offer a collection day service once a year to your community. Set up the structure so someone else can run with it the next time around.