Designing a cleaner future
A slum on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, received major media attention in 2010 and 2011 when the outside world realized where computers go to die. In an area called Agbogbloshie, impoverished residents were burning broken electronic parts, discarded and dumped by wealthier nations, to extract the metal components. Crouched around bonfires, they inhaled toxic smoke and unwittingly leached heavy metals into a nearby river, just to eke out a living. Rachel Field ’12, then an undergraduate engineering sciences concentrator, read the news reports and devoted her senior thesis project to addressing the problem. “It had gotten so much attention before, but it was amazing to me that almost nobody was trying to actually help out or figure out a solution,” she recalls. The result of her efforts is Bicyclean, a pedal-powered grindstone that pulverizes entire circuit boards inside a polycarbonate enclosure, capturing the dust. Though Field is now a year out of...