PurgeMe

Steve Heithecker introduced Matt Thorpe, Jenelle Thorp and Daisy Knowles. Tom Knowles introduced his wife, Sara Knowles.

Larry Bradley, after spending a lot of time talking about her accomplishments, presented the Student of the Month for December to JennelleThorpe. She was here with her parents, Matt and Jessica Thorpe. Jessica is, of course, a member of our club. Jennelle is currently President of DurhamHigh’s Interact Club and has contributed a lot of time helping out projects.

President Peggi, after reciting all the things he has done for Durham Rotary awarded Rotarian of the Month for December to Steve Heithecker.

President Peggi then recognized your editor for his 35 years in Durham Rotary with the presentation of a plant.

Our next meeting, on January 21st, will be at the Durham Memorial Hall. It will be about final planning for the Crab Feed, which will be 4 days later on January 25^th.

Recognitions

President Peggy recognized new member Imogen Hinds for her birthday on December 31, 2024. The club sang “Happy Birthday” to her. She contributed $20.

President Peggi auctioned the Grinder. Larry Bradley got it for $50. He said he only bid on it so StevePlume, who also bid, would not get it.

Tom Knowles introduced his wife, Sara Knowles. She is an attorney practicing in Chico, but because of connections with Glenn County she is also a temporary judge in Glenn County. This is an unpaid position. Her judgeship is limited to hearings under the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act.

Prior to 1967, California’s mental health system looked very different than it does now. Many more individuals with mental health disabilities lived in state hospitals and large facilities, often for long periods of their life. Then California passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act. T the LPS Act sought to, “end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of persons with mental health disorders.” It also established a right to prompt psychiatric evaluation and treatment, in some situations, and set out strict due process protections for mental health clients.

This publication outlines the basics of the LPS Act for mental health consumers. Chapter 1 describes the LPS short-termholds: “5150”s, 72-hour holds for evaluation and assessment; and “5250”s, 14-day holds for intensive treatment. Chapter 2 describes the LPS conservator-ship process, which governs treatment and placement of individuals found “gravely disabled” and in need of longer-term assistance through a third-party decision maker.

Sara is involved in the conservator-ship hearing process. She noted that a finding of “gravely disabled” must be beyond areasonable doubt.

Bring guests who you think you can interest in becoming a member. Your dinner and your guest’s dinner will be paid for by the Club. Also, bring a guest to one of our occasional social gatherings.

District 5160 Governor, Dan Geraldi is asking each club member to bring at least one guest toa meeting this year.

Go to the following Rotary International web site for information on membership development: https://my.rotary.org/en/learning-reference/learn-topic/membership . From this website there is access to membership development and other related information.

You can make a difference in this world by helping people in need. Your gift can do some great things, from supplying filters that clean people’s drinking water to empowering local entrepreneurs to grow through business development training.

The Rotary Foundation will use your gift to fund the life-changing work of Rotary members who provide sustainable solutions to their communities’ most pressing needs. But we need help from people like you who will take action and give the gift of Rotary to make these projects possible.

When every Rotarian gives every year, no challenge is too great for us to make a difference. The minimum gift to The Rotary Foundation is $25.00. An annual $100.00 gift is a sustaining member. Once your donations accumulate to $1,000 you become a Paul Harris Fellow.

It is possible to learn more about The Rotary Foundation on the Rotary web site.

Your gift can be made online or by sending Jessica Thorpe a check made out to TheRotary Foundation to Durham Rotary, P.O. Box 383, Durham, California 95958.

President Peggi recognized Steve Heithecker for his seventh Paul Harris Fellowship. Steve Plume talked about how easy it was to contribute a significant amount to the Paul Harris by donations over time.

Steve Heithecker drew Roy Ellis’ name. However, Roy was not present.

President Peggi then closed the meeting!

World class speakers including RI Past President Jennifer Jones, panelists, instructors andothers working in the field of peace are coming together for the region's first ever Rotary Peace Conference on January 24-26. Registration opens Aug 31 atPeace25.org

{Note that the following may not be the complete article. See the complete article on Rotary International’s News and Features web page}.

Electronic waste threatens the environment and public health. Refurbishment programs can help.

The smoke is black and poisonous. Palestinians in the West Bank, desperate to eke out a meager living, collectdiscarded electronic equipment — computers, TVs, printers, cables — and burn it to extract trace amounts of valuable metals. The resulting smoke is full oftoxic chemicals that infiltrate the soil, the water, and people’s bodies.

“People do it just to have a couple hundred shekels worth of copper, lead, whatever they can claim,” says AkramAmro, founder of the nonprofit Green Land Society for Health Development in the West Bank city of Hebron. “It’s an opportunity and a problem at the same time.”

Noxious plumes of smoke, like those in the West Bank, can be found in poor communities across the globe. As the worldbecomes more dependent on laptops, tablets, and smartphones — and as people continually upgrade to new devices — the need to find ways to repurpose orsafely recycle old electronics, or e-waste, has become urgent.

Amro and his organization have studied the environmental and health impacts in villages near burn sites. They’ve foundhigh concentrations of lead and chromium in the springs that people had relied on for water. “Now people can’t use the water from those wells, because it’sblack and contaminated,” says Amro, an associate professor of physiotherapy at Al-Quds University. “And we found evidence of contamination in the blood ofpeople working and living in those areas.”

Before the vast Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, was demolished, teenagers burn cablesfrom computers and other electronic devices to recover valuable copper.

Before the vast Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Accra, Ghana, was demolished, teenagers burn cables from computers and otherelectronic devices to recover valuable copper.

If that weren’t bad enough, Amro also found it particularly grim that toxic smoke from old electronics from Israelwas affecting Palestinian villages where many schools don’t have computers for students. He recruited a Rotary club in Jerusalem and one in the United Statesto help create a program to refurbish old computers for schools and hopefully divert at least some from ending up in burn sites.

The $13,000 pilot project, funded by a district grant and donations from multiple clubs, hired local workers to wipedisk drives and upgrade necessary components. In this way, the initiative addressed another problem in the community: It provided a few good jobs, saysMerrill Glustrom, a member of the Rotary Club of Boulder, Colorado. “They’re refurbishing computers, which could lead to programming computers or doingrefurbishing elsewhere,” says Glustrom, whose club has partnered with similar electronics recycling ventures in Colorado. “There’s lots of possibilities forthem besides dead-end jobs.”

A record 137 billion pounds of e-waste was generated around the globe in 2022, but only about a quarter was formallycollected and recycled in an environmentally sound way, according to a report from the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and other organizations. Most of the remainder was burned, dumped, or recycled unsafely, leeching dangeroussubstances into the environment and generating high levels of greenhouse gases. Researchers estimate that waste from devices such as computers, mobile phones,and flat-screen TVs was responsible for 580 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted in 2020 alone.

“You have a range of heavy metals in there — lead, cadmium, and others that are toxic — and you frequently find those ingroundwater close to waste sites,” says Sara Brosché, a science adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network. “You also have toxic chemicals in the plastics in e-waste. Flame retardants,for example, are very common.”

Increase in greenhouse gas emissions from some types of e-waste between 2014 and 2020

Factor by which the increase in e-waste is outpacing the rise of formal recycling for it

But there is an alternative. As in Hebron, Rotary clubs around the world are repairing and updating used electronicdevices and donating them to people who need them. In Australia, members of the Rotary Club of Chadstone/East Malvern collect devices, refurbish them, anddonate them to nonprofit organizations in the area. In Taiwan, members of the Rotary clubs of Ping-Tung Feng-Huang and Kaohsiung secured a Rotary Foundation global grant to fund a refurbishment program at a local junior high school. Like the Hebronprogram, it donates the computers to schools in needy areas. The initiative is on track to donate 100 computers by next June and 80-100 computers every yearafter that, says Fu-Chuan Shih, a member of the Kaohsiung club.

With guidance, the students fix up the old machines themselves. “We let the students personally disassemble the computers,clean them internally, reinstall and test the software, reassemble them, and carry out the final sorting and packaging,” Shih says. “In addition to allowingstudents to make a practical contribution to environmental protection, it is hoped that their demand for information equipment will no longer be just ablind pursuit of speed and efficiency but also reflect a concern for the environment.”

In Italy, members of the Rotaract Club of Milano Sforza are four years into a grant-funded refurbishing program launchedduring the COVID-19 pandemic. “In the COVID period, a lot of young people needed computers and other devices in order to [join online classes] and dotheir homework,” says Gianluca Cocca, the club’s service projects chair. “I have a technical background, so I said, ‘OK, let’s do it. We’ll start a wholenew service.’”

Cocca had to teach his fellow members how to refurbish the machines they collected, but now more than 100 peoplecontribute to the project. The club members clean the computers inside and out and upgrade some components, such as hard drives, that are too old to keep upwith current computing demands. They then donate the equipment to nonprofit organizations in the area.

The only problem? Fewer and fewer devices can be refurbished. “A computer made 10 years ago is totally perfect once it’sregenerated with good software and some upgrade of the hardware. It’s fine for Zoom meetings, things like that,” Cocca says. “But updating a smartphone isreally difficult. We can do nothing with the hardware.”

That’s because the phones — and increasingly tablets and laptops — aren’t designed to be upgradedwhen their technology starts to lag. Often, smartphone repairs are very difficult or impossible because you can’t remove and replace components withoutdamaging other parts of the device. Manufacturers want to force people to buy new equipment regularly, says Brandon Smith, a member of the Rotary Club ofWenatchee Confluence in Washington and the owner of an IT consulting company. “It’s planned obsolescence. Manufacturers do stuff like using industrialadhesive on the glass on the back of a phone. When that breaks, you have to chip it out one piece at a time,” says Smith, whose club led a computerrecycling event on Earth Day last year.

There are exceptions among manufacturers, though, at least where computers are concerned. Smith recommends thatecologically minded consumers buy from companies that design their machines to be repairable and upgradable. However, he adds, not many manufacturers do this.One is called Framework. “Framework built [its] platform to be fully upgradable, no matter what,” he says. “You can change out the keyboard. You canchange out the trackpad. You can change out the ports. You can change out the screen. It’s pretty cool.”

There’s no real cure for the e-waste problem, experts like Brosché say, except to make the whole life cycle ofconsumer electronics more eco-friendly. Unfortunately, the very existence of the problem comes as a surprise to many. Glustrom remembers how shocked he waswhen Amro told his club about the computers burned in the West Bank. Though Glustrom is proud of what their pilot project accomplished, he acknowledgesthat such efforts are just a small part of what needs to be a much more comprehensive movement.

“We have a throwaway society. That’s our consciousness. And we need to somehow get to a more circular economy,” Glustromsays. “But we’re running out of space and time in our environment, and we just can’t live this way any longer. We’ve got to make a switch.”

The Rotary International web site is: www.rotary.org

District 5160 is: www.rotary5160.org

The Durham Rotary Club site is: www.durhamrotary.org

The Rowel Editor may be contacted at: pbprice1784@gmail.com

The deadline for the Rowel 6:30 am on Wednesdays.

The Editor's photographs published in the Rowel are available, upon request, in their original file size. Those published were substantially reduced in file size.

Rotary District 5160 Governor:

Clair Roberts

Durham Rotary President: Glenn Pulliam

The Meeting Opening

Recognitions

2025 Calendar for Durham Rotary
J a n u a r y				1	2	3	4
	5	6	7 Meeting Conservatory Practice within Butte County (Tom Knowles)	8	9	10	11
	12	13	14 No Meeting	15	16	17	18
	19	20	21 Crab Feed Planning Meeting at Durham Memorial Hall	22	23	24	25 Crab Feed
	26	27	28 No Meeting	29	30	31
F e b r u a r y							1
	2	3	4 Crab Feed Debrief at the BCCC	5	6	7	8
	9	10	11 No Meeting	12	13	14	15
	16	17	18 Club Social at Memorial Hall	19	20	21	21
	23	24	25 No Meeting	26	27	28