Product stewardship is a concept whereby environmental protection centers around the product itself, and everyone involved in the lifespan of the product is called upon to take up responsibility to reduce its environmental impact. For manufacturers, this includes planning the recycling or disposal of the product at the end of its useful life.

Having taken this to heart and concerned with the impact of e-waste, a team of students from Aalto University in Finland and Stanford University in the United States developed a laptop, called the Bloom, that can be disassembled by hand into recyclable parts in minutes. By comparison, a commercially available laptop takes about 45 minutes to disassemble, requires three separate tools and involves as many as 120 steps.

"They spend 90% of their time prying 250 screws out of every device that comes in the door--it's very expensive and time-consuming," said Aaron Engel-Hall, one of the Bloom's designers.

The Bloom laptop is currently a prototype, and as of now, there has been no word on whether it would become commercially available in the near future.

(Source: A Laptop You Can Break Down By Hand, Then Recycle [MIT])