The cause¶
Junk Net is a storage system second. First, it's an argument: that the stuff we throw away still has value, and that communities can own their own infrastructure.
The e-waste problem¶
Electronic waste is one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world, and Australia is among the highest per-capita producers of it — estimates put us at over 20 kg of e-waste per person per year. Only a fraction of that is properly recycled; much of the rest goes to landfill, taking its lead, mercury, and lithium with it.
Laptops are a particularly frustrating part of the stream, because most of them aren't broken. They're retired because:
- the battery got tired,
- the OS vendor dropped support,
- an upgrade cycle came around at work, or
- they just felt slow under a modern desktop.
None of those things stop a machine from running a lightweight Linux image and serving a disk over a network. A laptop that's "too slow to use" is still a perfectly good storage node — it even ships with its own built-in UPS (the battery) and a fold-down status display.
Manufacturing is the real cost. Most of a laptop's lifetime carbon footprint — commonly estimated at 200–300 kg of CO₂-equivalent — is emitted during manufacturing, before the machine is ever switched on. Every year of extra service a laptop gives is a year another machine doesn't have to be built.
The storage problem¶
Cloud storage looks cheap until you have data. Then:
- prices ratchet upward, and egress fees punish you for leaving;
- "unlimited" plans get quietly redefined;
- accounts get suspended by algorithms with no appeal process; and
- your family photos live in a jurisdiction you've never visited, governed by terms of service you've never read.
For plenty of people — students, families, community groups, artists with big archives — a modest amount of trustworthy storage matters more than an infinite amount of corporate storage. Junk Net's answer is storage that is:
- Free for the people who help build it,
- Local, living on machines in your own community, and
- Owned by its users, with no shareholder whose interests can drift away from yours.
The community angle¶
The deal — donate a laptop, get storage — is deliberately circular. It means the network grows exactly as fast as the community wants it to, and everyone using it has skin in the game. There's no free-rider problem because the price of entry is the thing the network is made of.
There's also a quieter benefit: capability. Setting up nodes, running a mesh, administering an object store — these are real, employable skills. A community that runs its own cloud understands its own infrastructure, and that understanding compounds. The operator docs are written so that anyone curious can learn how the whole thing works, not just use it.
An honest note about the economics¶
Let's be upfront, because someone will do the maths: an old laptop idling at 10–25 W costs its host roughly AU$30–80 a year in electricity, to serve a disk that might hold a few hundred gigabytes. Per gigabyte, a commercial provider is cheaper.
Junk Net isn't trying to win that comparison. The point is what the money can't buy:
- hardware diverted from landfill instead of replaced,
- data that stays in your community under your community's control,
- infrastructure that can't be repriced, acquired, or shut down by a board meeting on another continent, and
- a network that gets stronger every time someone cleans out a drawer.
If you want the cheapest gigabyte on Earth, buy it from a hyperscaler. If you want a gigabyte your community owns — bring us your junk.