I was sorting a consignment of recycling in one of our e-crates when I came across this:

So here we have an M2x3 mm screw with part number DP/N OHCN8P or SG-OHCN8P-M0287-27C-1TRF REV A00. And it is quite a lot of packaging and quite a lot of part number for such a small item! Welcome to the 21st century I guess.

I think the screw is for a bit of Dell computer gear. Now Dell is normally quite good with their environmental policies but in this case it is not so good. This screw is probably used for mounting accessories. I would have thought a better way of supplying a screw for this sort of thing would be to incorporate it directly into the product. This idea is nothing new. In the old school XT’s and other desktop computers the screws used to hold in the expansion cards were part of the case (and held the blanking plates in place). Later models of desktop cases just had integral blanking plates that had to be broken out before putting in an expansion card. And there were no screws supplied!

Anyway, back to this M2x3 mm screw. Surely there would be a spot somewhere in or on the gear that it is used on where it could be stored? From an environmental point of view two plastic bags and a piece of paper would not be needed. From a job costing point of view there would be less material and less individual operations saving money on the production cost of the piece of gear.

Speaking of small screws I came across a website called LaptopScrews.com, a US based supplier that supplies, well, laptop screws. This is great! A supplier of a very specific product that is sometimes needed by repairers and DIYers.