"Garbatrage" Aims to Turn Low-Price E-Waste Into a Valuable Source of Prototyping Parts

Researchers from Cornell Tech have found a way to capitalize on the surprisingly low cost of fully-assembled devices like hoverboards while simultaneously helping the environment — through garbage arbitration, or "garbatrage," which seeks to turn e-waste into a ready supply of usable parts.

"This becomes an ambient frustration as a designer — the incredible cheapness of products that exist in the world, and the incredible expenses for prototyping or building anything from scratch," explains Ilan Mandel, a doctoral student at Cornell Tech, of the issue "garbatrage" aims to solve. "For the large part, we design and manufacture as if we have an infinite supply of perfectly uniform materials and components," adds co-author Wendy Ju, associate professor at Cornell. "That’s a terrible assumption."

The core driving force behind the research was a simple question of mathematics: breaking a brand-new, straight off-the-shelf hoverboard into its component parts revealed a bill of materials which added up to less than the device's selling price. From there, the team's focus expanded: what other devices are cheaper than the sum of their parts, and how many of these parts could be taken and reused in other projects for less than buying them specifically for that purpose?

Thus was born "garbatrage," a proposed framework for prototyping from salvaged hardware — beginning with those ultra-cheap hoverboards. "I think that there’s a real need to appreciate the heterogeneity of hardware that we are surrounded by all the time and look at it as a resource," Mandel explains. "What is often deemed as garbage can be full of value and can be made useful if you are willing to do some bridge work."

To prove the concept, the team has been turning hoverboards into the driving mechanisms for "trashbots," autonomous robot garbage cans deployed in public spaces. While many of the devices broken down for the project were visually distinct, the researchers found surprising commonality — wheels of different shapes and sizes being largely interchangeable, for example — though with warnings that the different frame designs are often built to varying standards of robustness.

"Designers are a kind of node of interaction between massive scales of industrialization and end users," Mandel says of the concept. "I think that designers can take that role seriously and use it to leverage e-waste in a way that promotes sustainability, beyond just asking the consumer to reflect more on their own practices."

The team's work has been published in the Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '23) under closed-access terms.