A new UN report finds that humanity is generating 137 billion pounds of TVs, smartphones, and other e-waste a year—and recycling less than a quarter of it.
109 devices per capita? I just walked through the house looking at what my partner and I have that plugs in. We don’t have 109 together. And it isn’t like I we don’t have stuff. Mesh wifi routers, camping gear. Heck we even have a refrigerator. What do people collect?
“average person has 109 devices” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person has 40 devices. Computers Georg, who lives in cave & has 10,000, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Some people change phones every year, or more often than that, then there’s all the coffee makers, small electronics nobody thinks about (watches, radios), computers and laptops, tvs, speakers, smart lights, kitchen tools, cars, anything digital (like calipers), power tools… Depending on what you count, it could add up to ridiculous numbers for some, skewing the average
I remember a while ago Motorola (before Google acquisition) came out with a phone that had a nearly indestructible screen. in the video they were throwing it off a roof, hitting it with a hammer, crushing it with a car, and all it had was a couple of dings. Haven’t heard a peep since then. What happened to that technology?
The insatiable need for thinner and lighter phones means that every new version of gorilla glass allows them to make it thinner. A 1mm piece of gorilla glass holds up way better than the thin shit they use.
Make laws that give consumers mandatory, irrevocable warranties that include fit-for-purpose clauses, and has phrasing such as “reasonable expected lifetime” for the goods. Make those laws apply to whoever sells you the goods, not the manufacturer.
Laws like that weed out a lot of crap. Shops won’t buy crap in because they have to deal with the warranty on said crap. Manufacturers won’t make (as much) crap because they have to deal with returns.
You won’t be able to buy a $4 air fryer any more, but the one you do buy will last a lot longer.
Edit: I’m Australian, and we have consumer rights over and above warranties offered by manufacturers. Those rights would be a good start.
an online store could operate from places where such laws don’t apply. most people nowadays mainly do their shopping online anyway and physical stores have largely disappeared unless it doubles as a warehouse. i guess australia and NZ has the advantage of stringent import laws though.
but i suppose this goes for my earlier argument as well.
According to the page linked in the post above, overseas businesses selling in Australia are subject to the same rules. It does say the rules might be hard to enforce on overseas businesses though.
I was really excited to see that OnePlus has official parts distributors that sell oem parts. I got a new battery, USB port, seal, screen protector and battery pull tab for $90.
Just a pity it costs $300 for a new screen.
The most fucked up part is that, if I could, I’d happily take in some of that trash to repair and recirculate it, but corporations make that as difficult as possible so as to not hurt their profits.
And I’d happily keep my current phone if it had security updates, but those ended a few months ago so I’ll be throwing out a perfectly good device.
I’m getting a Pixel for my next phone so I can get 7 years of updates, so I’m trying, but it just sucks that perfectly good hardware gets thrown out just because the manufacturer either blocks repairs or stops supporting it…
Parts are expensive and profit margins are thin. What’s stopping us from buying parts on eBay and reselling those phones for profit? You pretty much end up with the cost of the phone to repair the phone.
Anecdotal but in my career in corporate this has been the order of operations
Employees get any old equipment free if asked
Employees can pay for any old equipment if asked at a reduced cost
Employees can’t get any old equipment
The reason was they company wasn’t getting any benefit to give away the equipment. Then it was too much of a hassle to write paperwork for the sales which are then used to write down refreshes. Then they just blanket sold to another company which as an employee you then have to engage but with no discounts.
These big businesses make money hands over feet but god forbid they let Joe Employee keep his old laptop for his kid as an unofficial perk of working there.
Less and less, the last good stuff was made well before the millennium. It costs to put it in there, so manufacturing processes have become more plastic, less metal. Same goes for cars and white goods.
'Tis the nature of Economics. -If recycling for money were easy and profitable then it’s highly likely that someone would already be doing it really well and competition would be jumping in to reap some of the rewards. -That said, you will always need a ‘Pioneer’ to pave the way.
There are trace amounts of precious metals mixed in with a lot of other crap. It’s possible to recover them, but nobody is going to do that if recovery costs more than the metals are worth.
People are doing this, but it requires some gnarly acids and a lot of material. Think extracting gold from sticks of RAM with aqua regia. Not sure of the exact process but scrappers do this in some capacity. I’d imagine the waste from these processes is particularly nasty.
I feel a law that would go a long way would be to force companies to release code, drivers, and designs of any product they no longer support. That includes Intellectual Property. If you no longer support a product, then you don’t need the IP used on it.
We either get everything we need to use EOL products however we want, or companies support products much longer to protect their IP.
Wireless earbuds are trash and part of the problem, like wireless mouses. Stop putting irremovable batteries in things that don’t need batteries, its basically just planned obselecence on shinier more expensive goods. The last thing I want is to spend money on is good quality audio equipment that has a necessary end of life date due to charge cycles. These days you can scarcely find good headphones that arent wireless.
Even rechargable batteries have a limit, if you cant swap the battery as a user it’s part of the ewaste problem. It’s also a lot more power consumption for somthing that stays in a stationary space reletive to the computer or laptop.
The laws don’t go far enough to protect usability of both the hardware and software. For example, the new EU law about software, only requires smart TVs to have software updates for only 5 years (my own $2k Sony TV only gave me software updates for its AndroidTV for only 2 years! – these days I don’t connect it to the internet at all due to security problems). Who throws a TV every 5 years? IMO, it should ask for 6 years for full updated phones, plus 3 additional years for security updates, computers should go to 12 years, and TVs to 15 years.
Personally, I’ve been gathering old laptops and towers from friends and family and “upgrade” them with Debian and XFce. As long as they have more than 450 Passmark CPU points, and 2+ GB of RAM, these machines can still serve a purpose. So far, I’ve repurposed 12 such machines and gave them away back to their owner, my mom, my nieces, and two of my cousins. Even on machines with only 2 GB of RAM, it’s enough to run a browser with up to 3 tabs before touching the swap file (Debian/XFce clean-boots to about 800 MBs of RAM). That works just fine for someone like my mom who doesn’t even how to open a new tab, or for a young kid researching for school.
I would do the same with old phones too, but most of the models bought here in Greece are cheap Chinese Xiaomi/Huawei/realme phones, so LineageOS doesn’t support them. That’s the biggest travesty these days, since very few people buy computers now. Think if Google could ask as part of android license that all phones have usb-out for monitors, and all these phones can then be transformed like Samsung’s desktop DEX OS. I mean, most phones today have 4+ GB of RAM and 128 GB internal memory, just like an old laptop would. It should be able to transform itself into a desktop OS on demand and extend its life and its purpose.
I had this exact idea but for old Consoles: every PS4 could be a perfectly capable x86 Computer, 8GB of Ram and a AMD CPU, enough Power for Office and Web for a long Time. Only Problem the Software.
@ordellrb@eugenia The other place the motherboards of old phones could be repurposed is in embedded processors.
Most home appliances feature embedded processors and motherboards these days. Many commercial and industrial buildings and structures feature a range of embedded sensors.
In many cases, a repurposed three-year-old or even six-year-old iPhone or Samsung Galaxy motherboard is overkill in terms of being capable for these kinds of applications.
Especially if they’re reflashed with an embedded device-focussed operating system, such as QNX.
Instead of making new motherboards for embedded devices, why not repurpose old consumer tech instead?
The issue is the price of new hardware vs the hourly wages of people who are capable of reprogramming old stuff. If you are going to pay $100/h to get old stuff working and buying new stuff costs $20 then it’s cheaper to throw it out and buy new stuff.
@etbe@ajsadauskas so it’s on quantity. If you reprogram one device for 500 dollars and then reflash with that firmware other 1000 devices it will be much cheaper than new devices.
The development time and cost is an overhead. That’s divided between the number of units you produce.
If the programming costs are $100k and you produce one unit, then that unit costs $100k.
But if you flash the same software on to 1 million units, then it’s just 10 cents per unit.
Worth remembering that millions of people junking their two-year-old iPhones and Samsung Galaxies at roughly the same time.
I think the broader underlying issue is that our economy is optimised for labour productivity, rather than making the most out of finite environmental resources.
Reprogramming the 1000 other devices won’t be as hard as the first one but it won’t be trivial as they may be all on different versions of the software and there may be hardware variations too.
Just to triage the devices and determine which ones are good enough is going to be non trivial.
@etbe definitely. That’s why ve have internet - to connect many users of given devices. Like entuziasts of retro gaming consoles: some dudes spend time of reprogramming others help with sharing - fixing - adapting.
@mcSlibinas@etbe Worth noting that in the six months after Apple releases the thinnest, best iPhone ever each year, it would receive several million two-year-old iPhones as trade-ins.
So you could theoretically reflash several million units of nearly identical hardware with embedded Linux (or QNX), remove the batteries (and screens?).
You would then have several million near-identical motherboards ready for second life embedded in appliances or sensors.
@ajsadauskas@ordellrb@eugenia Quite a few of us have done that through the last two decades or more. Why not?! If it’s still useful, use it. I used a few older computers as print servers for businesses even back in the 1990’s.
It would be good if the EU could make USB-C docking functionality a requirement for all phones the way they made USB-C power a requirement. I doubt that Google could do it even if they wanted to.
As an aside Google REALLY doesn’t want companies to follow the example of Huawei with HarmonyOS. If any big player said “we will license HarmonyOS or develop our own thing if Google makes us do something we don’t like” then Google would give in.
Phones for desktop use is something I’m working on now. Not for old devices but for ultra portable work. I just paid $215AU for a Note9 with 8G of RAM. Until a couple of months ago my main laptop had 8G of RAM, that’s enough to do most non-server things you want to do with a computer.
I feel like the answer is recycling deposits somehow.
I’ve seen attempts at them here and there, but I guess we haven’t quite figured out the details yet.
I guess electronics are a bit trickier to set up a deposit system for than pop cans.
Even the places that do have electronics deposits, often you have to drive to a special recycling centre out past the airport that’s open 3 hours in the middle of the day, only for them to tell you that everything’s glued together so they can’t really separate out the parts they need and most of it will probably end up just going to the landfill anyway.
But theoretically, if we could get a serious deposit system that allowed for recycling to be profitable and gave manufacturers and incentive for making their stuff easier to take apart and recycling (and hence easier to repair), that would be pretty sweet.
A lot of the stuff you recycle doesn’t actually get recycled, at least in the US. I just got a new fridge and they carried old one away for me, but I’m pretty sure they just take it to the dump and the thing that’s recycled is the refrigerant.
I’m a huge fan of recycling, but I don’t think we actually process most of the recycling we have, so we should be focusing more on things lasting longer. Phones have kind of plateaued, so they should have longer support cycles, better repairability, and smoother resale.
I’m guessing childless adults are significantly less than that.
Just thinking about my kids and all of their book readers, barking animal toys, light-up fairy wands, I have a bad feeling they may be bringing up that average.
Though the nice thing about kids’ electronics is they never get obsoleted.
A light-up fairy wand is just as fun in 2074 as it is in 2024.
So they just get cycled through the 2nd hand mommy communities until they break.
It was $40 new, you buy it “mostly undamaged” for $20, hope your kid doesn’t scratch it too badly so you can sell it a couple years down the line for $10 or so.
The bad thing about kids’ electronics is it’s that for new stuff, it’s really impossible to tell how long it’s going to last.
Could be 20 years, could be 20 minutes.
Ironically the same stuck up bitches who are always virtue-posting about how green they are, (make damn sure the waiter knows they don’t want a straw in their drink, etc.) are the same people who insist on yearly Apple flagship refreshes so they get social affirmation.
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Don’t look into that recycling either. It’s just arbitrage all the way to the acid vat man.
I think the increase of so called “ewaste” after windows 10 eol next year will be huge.
I wish the EU would take action on this, extend the lifetime of Win10 another 10 years.
109 devices per capita? I just walked through the house looking at what my partner and I have that plugs in. We don’t have 109 together. And it isn’t like I we don’t have stuff. Mesh wifi routers, camping gear. Heck we even have a refrigerator. What do people collect?
“average person has 109 devices” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person has 40 devices. Computers Georg, who lives in cave & has 10,000, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Some people change phones every year, or more often than that, then there’s all the coffee makers, small electronics nobody thinks about (watches, radios), computers and laptops, tvs, speakers, smart lights, kitchen tools, cars, anything digital (like calipers), power tools… Depending on what you count, it could add up to ridiculous numbers for some, skewing the average
We need phones that don’t break so easily and we should be able to repair them and replace the battery, at the very least.
I remember a while ago Motorola (before Google acquisition) came out with a phone that had a nearly indestructible screen. in the video they were throwing it off a roof, hitting it with a hammer, crushing it with a car, and all it had was a couple of dings. Haven’t heard a peep since then. What happened to that technology?
They probably realized that profits would decrease.
The insatiable need for thinner and lighter phones means that every new version of gorilla glass allows them to make it thinner. A 1mm piece of gorilla glass holds up way better than the thin shit they use.
we have phones that don’t break easily and we can repair them and replace the battery; with long-term support.
what we need are laws that makes it mandatory for all.
Make laws that give consumers mandatory, irrevocable warranties that include fit-for-purpose clauses, and has phrasing such as “reasonable expected lifetime” for the goods. Make those laws apply to whoever sells you the goods, not the manufacturer.
Laws like that weed out a lot of crap. Shops won’t buy crap in because they have to deal with the warranty on said crap. Manufacturers won’t make (as much) crap because they have to deal with returns.
You won’t be able to buy a $4 air fryer any more, but the one you do buy will last a lot longer.
Edit: I’m Australian, and we have consumer rights over and above warranties offered by manufacturers. Those rights would be a good start.
They start about half way down this page:
https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/buying-products-and-services/consumer-rights-and-guarantees
an online store could operate from places where such laws don’t apply. most people nowadays mainly do their shopping online anyway and physical stores have largely disappeared unless it doubles as a warehouse. i guess australia and NZ has the advantage of stringent import laws though.
but i suppose this goes for my earlier argument as well.
According to the page linked in the post above, overseas businesses selling in Australia are subject to the same rules. It does say the rules might be hard to enforce on overseas businesses though.
They’re a dying breed, however.
fairphone is doing pretty well. their new one is quite competitive spec-wise too.
And Pandas are doing great, I saw one in the zoo.
I was really excited to see that OnePlus has official parts distributors that sell oem parts. I got a new battery, USB port, seal, screen protector and battery pull tab for $90. Just a pity it costs $300 for a new screen.
yeah, the screen on my Pixel 7A cost more than $200 to get replaced and I can find a brand new 7A for $250… not worth the risk of a bad repair
Anyone have a non-paywalled link to this article?
Edit: Never mind.
The most fucked up part is that, if I could, I’d happily take in some of that trash to repair and recirculate it, but corporations make that as difficult as possible so as to not hurt their profits.
And I’d happily keep my current phone if it had security updates, but those ended a few months ago so I’ll be throwing out a perfectly good device.
I’m getting a Pixel for my next phone so I can get 7 years of updates, so I’m trying, but it just sucks that perfectly good hardware gets thrown out just because the manufacturer either blocks repairs or stops supporting it…
Shout-out to framework laptops for repairable, upgradeable, and reusable components.
Parts are expensive and profit margins are thin. What’s stopping us from buying parts on eBay and reselling those phones for profit? You pretty much end up with the cost of the phone to repair the phone.
Anecdotal but in my career in corporate this has been the order of operations
The reason was they company wasn’t getting any benefit to give away the equipment. Then it was too much of a hassle to write paperwork for the sales which are then used to write down refreshes. Then they just blanket sold to another company which as an employee you then have to engage but with no discounts.
These big businesses make money hands over feet but god forbid they let Joe Employee keep his old laptop for his kid as an unofficial perk of working there.
E waste is full of precious metals. You’d think someone would figure out how to recover them.
Less and less, the last good stuff was made well before the millennium. It costs to put it in there, so manufacturing processes have become more plastic, less metal. Same goes for cars and white goods.
'Tis the nature of Economics. -If recycling for money were easy and profitable then it’s highly likely that someone would already be doing it really well and competition would be jumping in to reap some of the rewards. -That said, you will always need a ‘Pioneer’ to pave the way.
There are trace amounts of precious metals mixed in with a lot of other crap. It’s possible to recover them, but nobody is going to do that if recovery costs more than the metals are worth.
People are doing this, but it requires some gnarly acids and a lot of material. Think extracting gold from sticks of RAM with aqua regia. Not sure of the exact process but scrappers do this in some capacity. I’d imagine the waste from these processes is particularly nasty.
I feel a law that would go a long way would be to force companies to release code, drivers, and designs of any product they no longer support. That includes Intellectual Property. If you no longer support a product, then you don’t need the IP used on it.
We either get everything we need to use EOL products however we want, or companies support products much longer to protect their IP.
Wireless earbuds are trash and part of the problem, like wireless mouses. Stop putting irremovable batteries in things that don’t need batteries, its basically just planned obselecence on shinier more expensive goods. The last thing I want is to spend money on is good quality audio equipment that has a necessary end of life date due to charge cycles. These days you can scarcely find good headphones that arent wireless.
You convince anyone to take away my wireless earbuds and I’ll hunt you down.
Here’s a better idea, batteries that you can unscrew from the earbud.
Ok no but a wireless mouse is so much better, rechargeable batteries are the way
Even rechargable batteries have a limit, if you cant swap the battery as a user it’s part of the ewaste problem. It’s also a lot more power consumption for somthing that stays in a stationary space reletive to the computer or laptop.
The laws don’t go far enough to protect usability of both the hardware and software. For example, the new EU law about software, only requires smart TVs to have software updates for only 5 years (my own $2k Sony TV only gave me software updates for its AndroidTV for only 2 years! – these days I don’t connect it to the internet at all due to security problems). Who throws a TV every 5 years? IMO, it should ask for 6 years for full updated phones, plus 3 additional years for security updates, computers should go to 12 years, and TVs to 15 years.
Personally, I’ve been gathering old laptops and towers from friends and family and “upgrade” them with Debian and XFce. As long as they have more than 450 Passmark CPU points, and 2+ GB of RAM, these machines can still serve a purpose. So far, I’ve repurposed 12 such machines and gave them away back to their owner, my mom, my nieces, and two of my cousins. Even on machines with only 2 GB of RAM, it’s enough to run a browser with up to 3 tabs before touching the swap file (Debian/XFce clean-boots to about 800 MBs of RAM). That works just fine for someone like my mom who doesn’t even how to open a new tab, or for a young kid researching for school.
I would do the same with old phones too, but most of the models bought here in Greece are cheap Chinese Xiaomi/Huawei/realme phones, so LineageOS doesn’t support them. That’s the biggest travesty these days, since very few people buy computers now. Think if Google could ask as part of android license that all phones have usb-out for monitors, and all these phones can then be transformed like Samsung’s desktop DEX OS. I mean, most phones today have 4+ GB of RAM and 128 GB internal memory, just like an old laptop would. It should be able to transform itself into a desktop OS on demand and extend its life and its purpose.
I had this exact idea but for old Consoles: every PS4 could be a perfectly capable x86 Computer, 8GB of Ram and a AMD CPU, enough Power for Office and Web for a long Time. Only Problem the Software.
@ordellrb @eugenia The other place the motherboards of old phones could be repurposed is in embedded processors.
Most home appliances feature embedded processors and motherboards these days. Many commercial and industrial buildings and structures feature a range of embedded sensors.
In many cases, a repurposed three-year-old or even six-year-old iPhone or Samsung Galaxy motherboard is overkill in terms of being capable for these kinds of applications.
Especially if they’re reflashed with an embedded device-focussed operating system, such as QNX.
Instead of making new motherboards for embedded devices, why not repurpose old consumer tech instead?
The issue is the price of new hardware vs the hourly wages of people who are capable of reprogramming old stuff. If you are going to pay $100/h to get old stuff working and buying new stuff costs $20 then it’s cheaper to throw it out and buy new stuff.
@etbe @ajsadauskas True.
@etbe @ajsadauskas so it’s on quantity. If you reprogram one device for 500 dollars and then reflash with that firmware other 1000 devices it will be much cheaper than new devices.
@mcSlibinas @etbe Really good point.
The development time and cost is an overhead. That’s divided between the number of units you produce.
If the programming costs are $100k and you produce one unit, then that unit costs $100k.
But if you flash the same software on to 1 million units, then it’s just 10 cents per unit.
Worth remembering that millions of people junking their two-year-old iPhones and Samsung Galaxies at roughly the same time.
I think the broader underlying issue is that our economy is optimised for labour productivity, rather than making the most out of finite environmental resources.
It really should be the other way around.
Reprogramming the 1000 other devices won’t be as hard as the first one but it won’t be trivial as they may be all on different versions of the software and there may be hardware variations too.
Just to triage the devices and determine which ones are good enough is going to be non trivial.
@etbe definitely. That’s why ve have internet - to connect many users of given devices. Like entuziasts of retro gaming consoles: some dudes spend time of reprogramming others help with sharing - fixing - adapting.
@mcSlibinas @etbe Worth noting that in the six months after Apple releases the thinnest, best iPhone ever each year, it would receive several million two-year-old iPhones as trade-ins.
So you could theoretically reflash several million units of nearly identical hardware with embedded Linux (or QNX), remove the batteries (and screens?).
You would then have several million near-identical motherboards ready for second life embedded in appliances or sensors.
@ajsadauskas @ordellrb @eugenia Quite a few of us have done that through the last two decades or more. Why not?! If it’s still useful, use it. I used a few older computers as print servers for businesses even back in the 1990’s.
It would be good if the EU could make USB-C docking functionality a requirement for all phones the way they made USB-C power a requirement. I doubt that Google could do it even if they wanted to.
As an aside Google REALLY doesn’t want companies to follow the example of Huawei with HarmonyOS. If any big player said “we will license HarmonyOS or develop our own thing if Google makes us do something we don’t like” then Google would give in.
Phones for desktop use is something I’m working on now. Not for old devices but for ultra portable work. I just paid $215AU for a Note9 with 8G of RAM. Until a couple of months ago my main laptop had 8G of RAM, that’s enough to do most non-server things you want to do with a computer.
Anyone got a non paywalled version of this?
https://archive.ph/H5d4c
thanks. someone need to make a bot that auto-post archive links for paywalled sites though
I the mean time, mods should just make a rule that says archive links need to be added to the post body if there is a paywall.
And that said, I don’t get the Wired paywall at all and I’m not subscribed. I wonder if it’s an AB test.
I dont get it either besides that obnoxious banner that you can minimize… might be because of ublock origin addon
This is what I see. No banners, just a header and an article.
and this is the banner that I was talking about:
This is what you see when you run out of free articles:
Weird. I don’t even get a free article countdown.
I feel like the answer is recycling deposits somehow. I’ve seen attempts at them here and there, but I guess we haven’t quite figured out the details yet. I guess electronics are a bit trickier to set up a deposit system for than pop cans. Even the places that do have electronics deposits, often you have to drive to a special recycling centre out past the airport that’s open 3 hours in the middle of the day, only for them to tell you that everything’s glued together so they can’t really separate out the parts they need and most of it will probably end up just going to the landfill anyway.
But theoretically, if we could get a serious deposit system that allowed for recycling to be profitable and gave manufacturers and incentive for making their stuff easier to take apart and recycling (and hence easier to repair), that would be pretty sweet.
A lot of the stuff you recycle doesn’t actually get recycled, at least in the US. I just got a new fridge and they carried old one away for me, but I’m pretty sure they just take it to the dump and the thing that’s recycled is the refrigerant.
I’m a huge fan of recycling, but I don’t think we actually process most of the recycling we have, so we should be focusing more on things lasting longer. Phones have kind of plateaued, so they should have longer support cycles, better repairability, and smoother resale.
Oh cool another crisis, throw it on the big pile over there
I’ll just put it over here with the rest of the crises.
What the fuck?!?
I’m guessing childless adults are significantly less than that. Just thinking about my kids and all of their book readers, barking animal toys, light-up fairy wands, I have a bad feeling they may be bringing up that average.
Though the nice thing about kids’ electronics is they never get obsoleted. A light-up fairy wand is just as fun in 2074 as it is in 2024. So they just get cycled through the 2nd hand mommy communities until they break. It was $40 new, you buy it “mostly undamaged” for $20, hope your kid doesn’t scratch it too badly so you can sell it a couple years down the line for $10 or so.
The bad thing about kids’ electronics is it’s that for new stuff, it’s really impossible to tell how long it’s going to last. Could be 20 years, could be 20 minutes.
Ironically the same stuck up bitches who are always virtue-posting about how green they are, (make damn sure the waiter knows they don’t want a straw in their drink, etc.) are the same people who insist on yearly Apple flagship refreshes so they get social affirmation.