Closing the Gap through Old Tech
Old technology also represents a real employment opportunity. Resource recovery, refurbishment, sanitisation, and device destruction are all hands-on work that can't be automated – and that means jobs.
We're all about closing gaps - the digital gap for Australians, and Closing the Gap for Indigenous Australians.
But we're not just donating money, we're creating jobs, training the leaders of the future, and changing lives through our support of Worldview Foundation. And we're using e-waste as the vehicle to get us there.
Australia generated 511,000 tonnes of e-waste in 2019, a figure expected to grow by nearly 30% by 2023. Of that, only a third of the materials were ever recovered. That means more than $430 million worth of reusable materials – gold, copper, silver – went to landfill that year alone. Along with them went toxic substances like cadmium and mercury, which pose real environmental risks for current and future generations.
There's a better way, and it's something we do every day.
Rather than treating old technology as waste, we see it as an opportunity to create highly skilled jobs, increase funding for Worldview Foundation, and keep e-waste out of landfills.
That's exactly what Community Laptops is built on – ex-corporate and government machines that would have otherwise been disposed of, given a second life and sold at prices that make getting connected genuinely affordable.
Creating Opportunities for Indigenous Young People
Old technology also represents a real employment opportunity. Resource recovery, refurbishment, sanitisation, and device destruction are all hands-on work that can't be automated – and that means jobs.
Through Worldview Foundation, a charity dedicated to empowering Indigenous young people, we've has turned e-waste into social impact. Worldview offers skills training, mentoring, employment pathways, driving lessons, and wrap-around support to help Indigenous Australians break the cycle of generational disadvantage and build stronger futures.
To date, more than 200 Indigenous jobs have been created and over $31 million in social impact value generated.
So where others see IT asset disposal as a routine box-tick, we see genuine opportunity – for affordable, reused tech, for the environment, and for Indigenous communities across Australia.
