Recycling

Boliden recycles more electronics than almost anyone in the world. Old phones are full of copper, gold, silver, cobalt and lithium.

So we made a pet that lives on them. A rainbow-striped pixel monster, a bit like a Tamagotchi, that gets fuller and levels up the more you feed it.

1. On the iPad, swipe between a phone, a game controller, headphones and a camera. Tap one.
2. On the monster’s screen, it wakes up and starts to drool.
3. It chews. It swallows. Then it burps the metals back out as chemical symbols: Cu, Au, Ag, Pd, Co, Li.
4. Change your mind halfway, and it spits the thing back out.

• The monster lives on a Raspberry Pi with a small 5" screen, in our own Python application. It’s drawn at 100 × 60 pixels and scaled up for chunky pixels and a CRT glow.
• Its blirps and burps are synthesised live.
• The iPad and the monster talk over MQTT.
• Every meal sends five pulses along the threads, and a bird sings in the climate corner.