Caroline Brown, an ITP student in Jennifer Van der Meer’s class, is trying to do a life cycle assessment on the Duemilanove, to determine its environmental impact.  I think it’s an interesting idea, since I’ve never seen an LCA done on a module like the Arduino. I’ve seen a few on commercial products, but never on development tools.

She’s currently collecting info on how you use your boards and how long they stay in use. If you’re interested, her survey is online here. It’s anonymous.

This is a very short project she’s doing (only a few weeks long), so the results may not be conclusive, but nevertheless, I hope it’ll reveal enough about the environmental impact to delve into more assessment in the future. It’d be great to learn something about how to minimize the impact of what we do.