2022 Hackaday Prize: Reuse, Recycle, Revamp Finalists
The 2022 Hackaday Prize is focused on taking care of the planet. The theme of our second challenge round, “Reduce, Recycle, Revamp” is all about tailoring your projects to make use of existing resources and keeping material out of the landfill rather than contributing to it. Our judges have scrutinized the entries and handed me the sealed envelope. All of these ten projects will receive $500 right now and are eligible for the Grand Prize of $50,000, to be announced in November.
We were looking for two broad types of recycling projects in this round, either projects that incorporate a significant recycled component in their build, or projects that facilitate recycling themselves, and frankly we got a good mix of both!
On the first front, we saw projects that recycled plastic bottles, LCD screens, and the inevitable acrylic off-cuts that result when laser cutting. The X-PC even recycles most of the guts of laptop computers by creating a frame for mounting them as standalone desktops, and the ABN6502 uses scrounged up ICs to make a microcomputer. Skateboard decks made of recycled plastic? We’ll have to test them out, but it’s a cool idea and a great project.
In the machines-for-recycling category, we saw new progress on a neat project, the Plastic Scanner, which aims to build a device that can tell one type of recyclable plastic from another. And apparently the plastic that our 3D printers use is grinding a lot of peoples’ environmental gears, because we had filament re-extruders, filament recyclers, and even a Trash Printer that takes in scrap plastic and directly extrudes it into shape.
You can check out all the finalists in detail, listed in no particular order below. And if you’ve got a project that aims to keep devices out of the landfills by repairing them rather than recycling them, make sure to enter it in the Hack It Back challenge, going on right now.
Our congratulations to all of the finalists!
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