ASU alumna Kim Bass has an iPhone, an iPod and a GPS in her car. She buys her groceries from a Web site and has them delivered to her home.
When Bass bought her iPhone, she threw her old Motorola RAZR in the trash.
Like Bass, most consumers discard obsolete technology without thinking about where it goes, the ecological problems it causes by being placed in a landfill, or the potential consolidation of their new devices into a single machine that could perform various functions.
To deal with concerns like these, two ASU researches have been awarded a $25,000 grant from AT&T and its Industrial Ecology Faculty Fellowship Program to study the relationship between things like technology and transportation in hopes to improve the efficiency and sustainability of America’s technological and energy distribution infrastructure.
Braden Allenby, a civil and environmental engineering professor in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, and Eric Williams, an assistant civil and environmental engineering professor in the School of Sustainability, were the recipients of the grant.
The pair plans to use the funding to study current trends and technology to figure out the best way to utilize technological advancements in transportation and communication.
Allenby said relationships between different infrastructures should be studied to determine how to best use the technology average people have access to.
“We want to look at things like GPS systems that people have in their cars to understand the effect they have on things like traffic patterns,” Allenby said.
The study is far more complex than simply improving traffic problems, though.
“We want to look at things like eBay, and online commerce, and see if there is a way to improve on how people receive their purchases,” Allenby said. “People are already going to the grocery store. Why not designate the grocery store as a place to pick up the stuff people buy on eBay?”
Allenby said small modifications in day-to-day life are what need to be looked at to see how technological infrastructure should be redesigned.
“We have the technology that makes life a lot faster and the world a lot smaller,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’re still using infrastructure from the 1970s.”
The pair plans to use surveys to measure things like commerce, use of electricity and disposal of old technology, or e-waste, to help design business models and set policy initiatives that would utilize advancements in technology.
“The problem with e-waste is that people don’t understand the negative ecological effects of putting things like the lead and mercury in things like cell phones in a land-fill,” Williams said. “When you burn it, it’s bad.”
The ecological aspect is a minor part of the problem, Williams said.
“The major problem stems from our exporting our old technology to other countries who use it in poor quality items,” he said.
Williams said the most troubling issue in terms of ecology and technology is how people buy new things and throw them away more quickly than ever before.
New technology is introduced every day, and with that comes a greater need for energy to power devices like GPS or electric cars, Williams said.
“What we want to do is understand the multi-functionality of technological devices and figure out how to combine them into a single device that requires the least amount of energy,” he said.
Reach the reporter at jaking5@asu.edu.
