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"Welcome to the trash-technology media lab," says James Wallbank, as we gingerly pick our way through the clutter of five-year-old Compaqs and Hewlett-Packard printers in the entrance lobby of the Redundant Technology Initiative's world headquarters. Inside the office, which is located in a converted warehouse in the down-at-the-heels city of Sheffield, England, a colleague wrestles on the carpet with a donated hard drive from an obsolete computer.

The Redundant Technology Initiative (RTI) is unlike any other media lab or Web-design center you're likely to come across, but its mission of bringing Internet access to the technologically excluded via junked PCs and free open-source software is inspiring similar movements across Europe.

Wallbank and RTI's main mission is to turn long-forgotten Pentium 75s, 286s, 386s, 680x0 Macs, Amigas, and Ataris into powerful Internet communicators for the technologically disenfranchised.

Already, RTI's Linux-powered trash technology is making a real difference to people's lives and livelihoods. RTI has enabled dozens of local people to publish their own Web pages on subjects as diverse as digital art, community centers, environmental protests, Web design, music, and pure mathematics -- all at no cost. There's the unemployed designer who, with RTI's help, created a Web site to showcase his furniture and, within two months, had secured a licensing deal with a national office supplier. Or the politically active grandmother whose campaign on the Web helped turn the little-known problem of depleted uranium into a global concern.

"In less than two hours, we can teach anyone how to create a Web page using trash technology and free software like SimpleText or Notepad," says Wallbank. "We had to explain to one guy what the shift key was for. We taught a Kurdish refugee who couldn't speak English. Yet no one has failed to do it.

"Trash technology is available in your local area right now for no charge. It's the gift economy writ large."

While building a community-based network of media labs is RTI's primary goal, the group also functions as a cadre of ecologically aware digital artists who mold technowaste into multimedia sculptures to highlight the 3,000 PCs thrown out by British businesses every day.

And that statistic is likely to increase with memory-hungry, processor-thirsty releases like Windows XP. "There's a whole industry devoted to telling people that the PC on their desk is useless and needs to be replaced or upgraded. But the value in these things is what you do with them," says Wallbank. "Why should we need 32 megabytes to write a letter now when we didn't before?"

The (Accidental) Birth of a Low-Tech Network

Long-haired, bearded, and lanky, the 34-year-old Wallbank first whet his appetite for technology in the late 1980s while dabbling in something called FidoNet, a precursor to the Internet, where he was buzzed by the experience of peer-to-peer education. "I would ask technical questions and get essays back," he recalls. "Before long, I was answering those same questions for new users. I had gone from amateur to expert in just six months, not by taking a course but by tapping into the knowledge of existing users. It was a collective, decentralized learning process."