When you think of recycling electronics, no doubt you imagine the old PC or mobile phone being disassembled, and it’s metal and plastic parts melted down to be repurposed. But for some people, it means reusing the parts to grow algae.
Students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created Bio-Grow, a device made from various computer parts that serves as a reservoir to cultivate algae.
The algae can then be used in biodiesel production, which could potentially replace petroleum in the futures.
“If someone had one of these in their homes, they would cultivate algae and extract it,” said team member and undergraduate student Megan Kenney. “Then they could take it into a gas company that was set up with an oil filtration facility and get credit off their gas.”
Kenney, along with undergraduate students Timothy Harvey, Elliot Reese and Mark Schnitzer, and graduate student Saeidreza Shiftehfar was focused on finding a way to be green, and ended up winning second place in the International Electronic Waste Competition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with their design.
“The whole point of our project was two different concepts,” Schnitzer said. “To use electronic waste and to solve a green issue in the world.”
Which is why the team chose to use old electronics to build the device called an algae bioreactor. It encourages photosynthesis, the chemical reaction that happens in plants, which uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into sugar.
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