It takes talent, luck and charisma to become a rock star (or money, connections and good looks, depending on how you look at it). It’s much harder to become a rock star of the open-source hardware movement. One way to do it is to create a compostable server chassis. No big deal, right?

This is the challenge a class of students at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, have. The webpage for the engineering contest, sponsored by the university and by the Open Compute Project, describes it as “a chance to be a rock star in the open-source hardware movement.”

Why? No matter how much IT equipment we recycle, as of today, we cannot do it without leaving a lot of waste behind. Mark Monroe, former executive director of The Green Grid, says the automobile industry has made progress in using biodegradable materials for some car components (such as seat fabric), and so can the IT industry.

“It made sense that the computer industry would go that way as well,” Monroe says. He spent a lot of his career working in the field of corporate sustainability, first as director of sustainable computing at Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) and later as president of a corporate-sustainability consulting firm. In September, he left The Green Grid to work as CTO of DLB Associates, a data center design and engineering company.

Most members of the Open Compute Project, an open-source hardware and data center design community started by Facebook, come from the business world, and adding academia into the mix is a good move, Monroe says. “Bringing the academic institutions into the fray is probably a great idea,” he says. “The material-science problems that they’re solving these days … are fantastic.”

Material science is in line with OCP’s focus on greater efficiency and sustainability, an OCP spokesperson wrote in an email. This is especially important to consider when designing IT equipment deployed at massive scale, which is what the designs published through the project to date have been: Facebook-scale servers and infrastructure. “The material sciences piece is new, but it's something we think Purdue is well equipped to handle,” the spokesperson wrote.

Many companies, especially those whose core business relies on their technology infrastructure, replace servers every two or three years. “We think there’s enormous potential here,” John Kenevey, group program manager at Facebook, wrote in a blog post where he announced the Purdue challenge. “And even though the steel in those server chassis is usually recycled, we think it’s worth exploring designs that retain the needed resiliency but push the boundaries of sustainability.”

Several teams of students will get Open Compute servers to try new chassis designs on. The university will help the winning teams fund creation of a prototype.

Today, major IT vendors put a lot of thought into minimizing the environmental footprint of their products, focusing this energy mostly on recycling. Kirk Bresniker, VP and chief technologist for HP’s Business Critical Systems group, says the company has worked hard training its engineers to understand the recycling process. “It’s something that I know … our mechanical engineering teams – that design the plastic, the metal and the fiber-glass components – have been working on for many years to understand,” he says.

Simply making a server out of recyclable material is not enough. The process of recycling it has to be straight-forward and cost effective, otherwise the recycling companies will not touch it, Bresniker says.

Monroe suggests that not only should students in the competition look at materials used in server chassis, they should also try to minimize the amount of material used to build the chassis. In most cases today, that material does not do anything. The enclosure is really a legacy feature left over from the days when servers set on desktops or under the desks, as the majority of modern servers live in data center racks and cabinets.