“Reusing computers to protect the environment, Save and create quality jobs.”

The cooperative, and social enterprise, Reware (www.re-ware.it) runs a workshop that is open from may 2007.
It is a true workshop open to the public every day from 10 at 19, where can I buy refurbished computers, or where you can regrow your.

The workshop is more than just a shop of used.

The 4 cooperative members decide everything on the basis of consensus, remunerate their work identically, regardless of professionalism, and you are banned, by statute, any redistribution of profits, in order to fall within the definition of social enterprise. For this purpose they even managed to recognize its "social utility" by Chambers of Commerce, as defined by law 155 of 2006.

These conditions give the measure of ethical commitment and environmentalist Reware partners, and the care with which they work doggedly, for years, the reducing the environmental impact of electronic waste.

To date the electronic equipment, Informatics and in particular, pose a serious threat to the environment to which have not yet been found effective solutions.

The laws on waste, arising from the waste framework directive of the European Commission, 98/08, define a precise order of priorities for waste reduction, the hierarchy of 4R, that puts primary emphasis on the prevention, starting with the ecodesign (new producers should create reusable/recyclable equipment spaces), What unfulfilled, and probably unachievable, and repair and reuse.

In order of priority is environmental recycling long after, Since it is efficient only in part.
Rarely are able to extract more than 50% of secondary raw materials worth of information technology equipment. This is due to the fact that these devices are composed of hundreds of tiny components and dozens of forms of complex chemistry hardly can be processed separately. The recycled material cost is often higher than that of Virgin material, In addition industrial recycling processes are energy-consuming and create in turn particularly polluting waste.

The cooperative Reware is involved in phase of life, where there's more room for improvement.

The main activity of the cooperative is to retrieve large quantities of discarded computers from businesses, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the operation of computers, and restore them, possibly with the operating system Linux, to sell them at low prices. Like this You can lengthen the life of your computer than twice, which is equivalent, from an environmental perspective, in halve the environmental impact, because you send for disposal half of computer.
In this process, Linux is a doubly important, first is the bearer of very strong ethical values, such as sharing knowledge and freedom of expression, and secondly, Thanks to the fact that open source software allows you to create lighter, It has the advantage of working well even on older computers, which allows the cooperative to further lengthen the useful life of the machines. For these reasons, many people are turning to Reware to install Linux on their computers "differently".

Obviously this task only makes sense in the light of a very important consideration: most people use computers for simple tasks, but the new computers for sale, even the cheapest ones, are oversized for use that people can do at home; on the other hand, companies have a particularly powerful computers needed for obvious reasons of productivity, and replace them often.

This type of activity, Advanced use, highlights and makes concrete the so-called "residual value" of the equipment, which represents a collection of positive externalities unspoken, such as the ability, already explained, environmental prevention, but also potential local economy growth virtuosa, savings for companies in terms of unnecessary disposal of goods still reusable, opportunity for the poorest sections of the population to access business technologies, and lower costs and environmental impacts due to production cycles and to transport larger amounts of new computer.

For all these reasons I strongly recommend you to turn to this type of organizations, not just to buy equipment or to retrain your, but also to consider whether to allocate your old PC, also not working, the virtuous cycle of reuse. (TEXT WRITTEN by the cooperative, and social enterprise, Reware)