CAS OUTREACH NEWS


IEEE CAS Outreach Workshop in Lausanne 2014: Environmental Impact of Circuits and Systems

During the last decade human life has become deeply linked and influenced by electronics-related technologies. This brings fantastic new applications for facilitating and improving our lives but unfortunately also includes extremely bad impacts on the environment, which in-turn lead to deleterious human health and social impacts. These concerns are especially prevalent during the  end of their life cycle. Every year tons of computer boards, cell phones, casings, keyboards, tv sets and other electronic devices are disposed of. Many of these devices contain poisonous substances that are dumped in remote areas of Africa or Asia. Often children are employed to disassemble them, resulting in many negative humanitarian, labour, environmental issues associated with this "end of circuits and systems" lifecycle. Many organizations, companies and universities world-wide are undertaking efforts toward alleviating these issues. These efforts include better utilization of resources, improvement of designs towards reuse of materials, and creating curricula for graduate studies directed to better educate a new generation of engineers aware of the above-mentioned problems and capable of bringing efficient new solutions.

Our workshop, held on October 25, 2014 at the EPFL campus in Lausanne, provided an overview of current problems and solutions offered in our domain of interest - circuits and systems technologies. The workshop program was opened by Maciej J. Ogorzalek, and then followed by a number of presentations including

  1. •The Awareness and the Role of Engineering for Sustainability by Joos Vandewalle

  2. •Giving a New Life to End of Life Electronic Equipment in a Sustainable and Responsible Way by Egbert Lox

  3. •From Waste to Gold: Cradle to Cradle Material Recycling of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment by Joost Duflou

  4. •Green IC Manufacturing by Marc Heyns

  5. •Need for Circuits and Systems for Future Electricity Power Distribution
    by Mario Paolone

The workshop concluded with a Panel Discussion moderated by Maciej J. Ogorzalek, and finally closed with an action plan summarized by Joos Vandewalle.

The workshop was organized as a post-BIOCAS 2014 workshop at the premises of the Swisstech Convention Center on the EPFL campus in Lausanne. The workshop was sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society through the Outreach Program and was free of charge and open as well to the participants of BIOCAS as to outside interested people.  Also supporting the Workshop was the Fetzer Institute http://www.fetzer.org. Although 74 people had registered for the workshop, about 20 participated.

All participants and speakers were excited about the quality of the presentations and the expertise of the speakers.  Many of them turned in feedback and expressed clear views about using the visual material and the insights in their professional and educational activities. The pdfs of the presentations are posted on a webpage and can also be downloaded by clicking the links above.

For further details, please refer to http://biocas2014.org/content/outreach-workshop


Maciej Ogorzalek, Sandro Carrara and Joos Vandewalle

Workshop Organizers

 
VOLUME 8, ISSUE 6, DECEMBER 2014