The third sustain-a-thon of DiCE, organised by Games for Health and INTRAS Foundation took place in Valladolid, Spain on April 13th.
This participatory activity, similarly, to the previous events, aimed to explore how to reduce the environmental impact of electronic waste from digital healthcare by delving into the habits of use, and needs of social and health care professionals and citizens. Researching different perceptions of these issues is essential to investigate new concepts, and strategies on how to achieve sustainable behaviour change. So, providing a new outlook on the matter, more than 30 people joined our final sustain-a-thon in Spain, including professionals with different expertise (social and health care professionals, researchers, manufacturers, engineers, professionals in the recycling sector, representatives of public administrations) but equally knowledgeable in the field of circularity and eco-design, and different generations of citizens.
The session, as did in Belgium and Slovenia, focused on the search for personal experiences and motivations for the recycling of digital health devices, through an exchange of ideas, opinions and mutual discussions, resulting in very interesting achievements and insights given the multidisciplinary nature of the working groups. During the workshop, interesting ideas and potential solutions for the recycling, refurbishment, remanufacturing and reuse of electronic waste were proposed in addition to identifying multiple limitations and barriers that hinder this process.
A fruitful morning passed with our participants eager to share their knowledge and construct creative ideas. The partakers mutually benefited by sharing their concerns, and interests on how to contribute to the fight against electronic waste, as well as discussing how to give a second life to digital health care devices.
What’s more, the inciting concept of DiCE had already reached the City Council of Valladolid with a personal representative in the audience of last week’s workshop. The Council showed great interest in the eventual results of the project, which will help increase its transferability to local public policies.
The solutions proposed during our sustain-a-thon sessions will be analysed in detail by the DiCE consortium to determine their real technical and economic feasibility as well as their long-lasting impact. Given that we conducted the same exercises in three different countries, our partners will have a better understanding of different motivations not only linked to gender, age and preferences but see how participants are influenced by location and culture.
The sustain-a-thon in Valladolid was prepared and conducted in cooperation of two DiCE project partners:
Games for Health is an Eindhoven-based company that develops applications for behavioural transformation in everyday life. They believe that play is the way to get flexible people and adaptive organisations that are capable of proactively dealing with a rapidly changing world.
INTRAS Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to high quality research and intervention in the field of Mental Health, Ageing and Disability with more than 20 years of experience combining research, training, social and health care, Neuro-Psychological intervention, technological developments, therapeutic innovation and clinical practice.
