The crucial underpinnings of the entire web are acres upon acres of servers. Google alone uses almost a million. These servers have a useful life of no more than four years, and every time they need to be scrapped, billions (as much as $45 billion) are spent on refining, with tons of harmful elements entering the atmosphere and large amounts of energy being consumed. If your immediate response to this wasn’t, “Aha! Well we should just make the servers out of compost!” well, you may not work for Facebook.

See, Facebook’s massive catalogue of user profiles and photos, has forced the site to maintain massive server farms, which in turn forced the site to have a big stake in the problem of server recycling. That’s why the social media giant has created the “Open Compute Project”, a project with the goal of first creating a recyclable server chassis that will pave the way for fully biodegradable data storage.  If successful, the project could pave the way to even more biodegradable gadgets, from laptops to keyboards to mobile phones.

Currently though, this destination is years, if not decades, away. The Open Compute Project is engaging a contest for students at the University of Purdue. Whichever team submits the most environmentally conscious designs for the server casing will be invited to the Open Compute Summit to present the design, which is predicted to raise the gifted but unknown students to “rock-star” status within the data storage architecture community. As the chassis of the server is not actually in any way a server (it is the case and mounting for the server “rack,” the part that actually processes data), the project will not change the way that anyone lives or works. But it could be the first step on the road to an era where you can toss away your cellphone when the battery dies.

What do you think? Are biodegradable devices too impermanent, or would you prefer to use something that would give back to the earth when you no longer could use it?