Deal Creates New Homes for Portland’s Old PCs
By Mike Rogoway, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
Jun. 6–Old computers decommissioned by the city of Portland are set to get new life in the homes of Portland students and others in need of low-cost technology.
A resolution before the Portland City Council on Wednesday directs the city to offer up to 1,000 aging PCs annually to Free Geek, a Southeast Portland nonprofit group that refurbishes and recycles old computers.
Free Geek, founded in 2000, takes in between 10,000 and 12,000 donated computers a year. The oldest computers, about 80 percent of those donated, are stripped down for recycling.
More current machines are refurbished, loaded with open-source software and given away to people who volunteer at least 24 hours working at the nonprofit. The agreement with the city will increase Free Geek’s annual donations by about 8 percent.
“It isn’t a huge uptick in flow, although it’s significant, certainly,” said Jeff Robinson, production coordinator at Free Geek.
“In terms of the likely ages of the machines and usability, it could help us do a lot of things,” he said.
Many of the computers Free Geek receives have languished in basements and closets for several years, he said, and their technology has grown too old to be useful. But the city’s computers are likely to be more current, which could increase the percentage of Free Geek machines that can be reused.
Free Geek won a $24,900 grant from Meyer Memorial Trust earlier this year to buy a truck, which gives Free Geek wheels to pick up the city’s old computers.
The city’s resolution, sponsored by City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, calls on Free Geek to develop an outreach plan to provide computers to Portland students who don’t have them. Robinson said Free Geek recently hired an education coordinator to help do that.
The city owns about 5,500 computers and aims to replace each one every four years, according to Mark Greinke, the city’s chief technology officer. In practice, though, he said many offices don’t have the money for regular upgrades.
Portland scraps between 700 and 1,000 computers a year — meaning its discarded computers are more than 6 years old, on average.
Still, Greinke said, most of the computers the city will discard could be helpful for many home computer users — especially because Free Geek loads its computers with the open-source operating system Linux, which is much less taxing for computers than Microsoft Windows.
The city previously paid a private company to dispose of its old computers, Greinke said, so it will save money by directing old machines to Free Geek. The savings will be partially offset, though, by the costs of ensuring that all confidential data on the old computers is erased.
“It still probably saves money,” Greinke said, “and if you’re looking at what you’re doing for the community, it’s a value.”
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