Happy Holidays from Free Geek

Whew, what a year! As 2013 draws to a close, we at Free Geek are looking forward to the holiday season. We hope this has been as great a year for you as it has for us. With the help of the 788 volunteers we’ve welcomed this year, we have been able to accomplish so much, including tackling veritable mountains of electronics with our (gloved) hands. Just look at these numbers!

12,262 pounds of wire

11,280 pounds of e-waste
9,536 pounds of circuit boards
6,301 pounds of steel
3,736 pounds of hard drives
3,583 pounds of batteries
2,943 pounds of fans
2,904 pounds of transformers
2,745 pounds of motherboards
2,280 pounds of aluminum

All this adds up to a dizzying total of 57,570 pounds of e-waste, roughly the equivalent weight of two Metro Vancouver buses packed with commuters at rush hour – quite the haul.

We are proud to say that we, along with our indispensable team of volunteers, have refurbished, resold, or ethically recycled every item listed and saved it from its fate in a landfill. Cheers to Free Geek, and three cheers to all our volunteers! Your commitment and enthusiasm made this achievement possible. We look forward to working with both new and familiar faces in 2014.

We are also very excited to greet the upcoming year with projects that will help us to further educate and inform our community about ethical e-waste recycling. Look for us at community events and trade shows in and around Vancouver – we are still finalizing the particulars, but we will keep you posted on Facebook and Twitter, as well as here on our blog. We are planning monthly blog posts to keep our volunteers, followers and fans abreast of all that is happening. Make sure to check back for the latest news, and as always feel free to contact us with your questions.

Best wishes from the Free Geek Vancouver family. We hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, and a safe and happy New Year.

Free Geek Toronto

I was in Toronto at the beginning of March, and while I was in town I paid a visit to Free Geek Toronto.  They are located in a west end neighbourhood called The Junction.  

Here are a few pictures that I took:

The entrance is through an alley, the sign was slightly buried in the snow.

Main entrance

The store area. 

A build station.

I found this posted on the Free Geek Vancouver Google+ page, it's pretty awesome: Free Geek Commercial

Go watch the video, the you tube counter is only at 50 right now, let's see if we can double that!  Who said we don't think big at Free Geek.

Brought to you by Orange Peel Productions. Thanks organge peel for the awesomeness.
 

General Meeting Tuesday April 9th

The next Free Geek general meeting will be at the Free Geek Vancouver warehouse. Tuesday April 9th, 2013 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm.

Free Geek on Google+

Hello Free Geek Followers, Alec has been busy being a dad, and hasn't had time to update this blog recently. My name is Justin Simpson, I am the newest Free Geek Vancouver board member, and I offered to help out by posting to this blog. For those of you interested in Free Geek Vancouver, if you use Google+, check out the Free Geek Vancouver page there. We'll continue to update this blog too, so stay tuned. Justin

New Blog

Unfortunately I haven't been able to volunteer at Free Geek in the last few months -- I have a baby daughter who demands and deserves as much free time as I can muster. While I still have projects on the go, their connection to Free Geek Vancouver has become tenuous enough that I've decided to separate them from this blog.

Please consider dropping www.cassettepunk.com into your feed reader. I'll be documenting my projects there. I'll continue to contribute to this blog when I have the chance to drop in, and will be soliciting contributors from the volunteer community to keep it lively.

The first new project I've described at cassettepunk.com is Nickelmatic, an automated Nickelback lyric generator.