To be clear: yes, you can make circuits out of all sorts of cool stuff. But, you can't make the high-speed, high-performance, ultra-compact circuits required to meet the demands of the products out of just anything. I'd love to see one doing layout for a big fat BGA device oscillating at 1.5GHz on a lasagna noodle, much less getting down to sub-6-mil traces, or 4+ layers.
Pray tell though, what affordable semi-conductor material is there out there to replace silicon, that is readily recyclable and achieves the same target?
I fear, too many people want their cake and to eat it too - you want the latest and greatest capabilities (want, not need), but you want them to make it in a way which it will not function, so that you can feel good about it. ("You," being the standard consumer, not any one person in particular.)
"PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) are guilty too – recyclability is incredibly low (and very expensive) and they do not decompose. Why can’t use a biodegradable material instead of silicon?"
PCBs are NOT made of silicon. Integrated circuits are (but not their packages). PCBs are usually FR-4 material:
The problem with products is not that they're made from materials like aluminum or silicon or glass but that these materials are combined in ways that make it very difficult to extract them from the finish product when recycling.
Apple has gone a long way to making parts that are more "pure", where, for instance, the chassis of new computers is milled from a solid piece of metal that, once removed, can be shredded and reformed with no more difficulty than a drink can. The same goes, in principle, for the glass.
The plastics in most computers are made from an exotic blend of materials and are not easily reprocessed.
What we need more than cardboard computers is standards on how to manufacture products so they can be unmanufactured in the end and rebuilt into other things. The goal here is for 0% loss in the recovery cycle. Anything below 100% is not, by definition, sustainable.
If that sounds impossible, consider that the natural ecosystem in which we all live tends towards a 100% recycling rate. There are very few natural byproducts that do not have a recovery path. For instance, most trees produce enormous amounts of "garbage" in the form of leaves but these are almost immediately recycled.
Given that the natural world has been doing this for literally billions of years, there is much to be learned.
Interesting that you bring up Apple here considering the fact that it's latest products cannot be recycled due to design decisions (I.e., melding the glass display onto the frame)
A clean separation of materials is not required at the recycling facility, at least in theory, as most of the recycling methods being explored involve shredding the product up front and separating the resulting bits.
The recycling process becomes extremely complicated when the composition of the materials is non-uniform. The common worst offender in this regard is plastic bottles with several different types of plastic layered together. The opposite is a glass bottle with a metal cap.
Provided you can smash and pulverize a product into sufficiently fine pieces you can separate it by material.
Current recycling techniques cannot (supposedly) deal with this, but it's likely that new methods could be developed which could. Ideally, Apple's designers would actually work directly with recycling centers to develop a strategy for efficient recycling of their product. This could even be done later on, when the existing product is replaced with a new version.
As is true with most things, this is a case of where consumers need to vote with their wallets. While it would be great if the world ran on great intentions and thinking for the future, the reality is that money talks today, and today is the most important of all days, because nobody knows if they'll be around tomorrow.
tldr - Admirer of gadget fashion design ponders wastefulness of consumer culture. Wants for token "recycling" to soothe his conscience. Looks at conceptual art projects as if they're close to practical technology. Finishes up penance and walks away thinking that he has earnestly evaluated his own wastefulness.
I don't see how "built to last" means "built out of cardboard." I can't find the original Rob Walker piece, but it sounds like it's talking about timeless quality vs. empty fashion, not about the environment.
An iPhone lasts a long time, and the author should be comforted that not everyone can afford to buy a new one every time Apple bumps the version, naturally limiting Apple's ability to fill landfills with barely-used iPhones by launching new product features.
The net footprint of a big company like Apple is surely complicated, as there are many ways to offset one's impact. I'm no expert, but Apple has a whole website on their strategy (http://www.apple.com/environment/) that shows they are making an effort, perhaps a large one.
No, he's saying that products that are destined to be obsoleted quickly should not be built to last. If something is disposable, make it look disposable. Of course, that's not going to happen.
Please, don't conclude that Apple (and now Google) products aren't recyclable because of a quote from Wired citing some "friends from the recycling industry".
One thing I do know is that iPhones and other Apple products have high resale value, that there's an industry thriving on selling replacement screens, batteries etc.
This wouldn't be the case if most people considered these devices crap and obsolete the day a new product was introduced.
From my experience, people keep their Apple products for many years, often giving them to other family members when they upgrade themselves. If they weren't built to last, this would be impossible to do.
The real landfill fillers are the crappy plastic phones that get scratced and damaged.
I think your mental timescale here is a bit too small. "Built to last" means what? 10 years, optimistically. That means that in 10 years, those products will still be sitting in a landfill...for hundreds of millions of years.
There are choices that hardware designers can make that will help mitigate this at least to some extent, but unfortunately, it appears as if we are moving further and further away from this (the glass glued to the display being one example).
Remember, of the three things we're all supposed to be doing, recycling is the absolute worst.
Followed by reuse, then reduce.
It could be argued that making a device reusable is actually better than making it recyclable.
The consumers of this world seem to be caught up in this "recycle it" craze. Somehow it's fine to churn through 30 plastic water bottles a week, because they are going in the recycling.
In reality, the water bottles should be gone entirely.
And if we were limited to choosing between reducing, reusing or recycling, then perhaps we would want to scrap recycling all together. But we're not. I would argue that making a device that can be reused and recycled is better than both.
I'm not saying there is a problem with having items that are reusable (on the contrary, its great. The longer the lifecycle of an object, the less overall objects we produce). I'm just saying that while we are trying to limit the amount of "product" that is produced (the net effect of reusing and recycling), we also need to keep an eye on how to get rid of all this "product" once we are done with it.
Besides recycling is just another form of reusing, is it not?
>And if we were limited to choosing between reducing, reusing or recycling, then perhaps we would want to scrap recycling all together. But we're not.
We're not "limited" to doing any of those three things. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is all about choices. What we "should" be doing. What's "best". We should "aim" to reuse rather than recycle.
> Besides recycling is just another form of reusing, is it not?
Recycling uses exponentially more energy, especially when you're talking about glass and aluminum.
I don't see why this is a XOR situation. Ideally, we would be reducing production, and what we do produce would be readily reusable AND (eventually, when we have gotten past the useful lifecycle of an object, and every object has one) recyclable.
If people recycle them, they won't be in that landfill. And many countries (at least in Europe) now recycle all garbage.
Even stuff glued together can be separated and be recycled.
Making long-lasting, more expensive products certainly decreases the amount of devices that end up in landfills.
And isn't the "glass glued to the display" simply one less piece of glass that needs to be recycled? The previous solution was a display unit with a thin piece of glass, and then a bigger protective piece of glass in front of that. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here).
Per the Wired quote, Apple will recycle products you take to the store (edit: or mail to them), and offers either a gift card or 10% discount if you do so.
If we charged for inputs and wastes properly, that would pressure economic chains from both ends to minimize environmental impact.
We don't. For inputs we generally charge the cost of digging something up out of the dirt, and for outputs we charge the cost of burying something under the dirt. We shouldn't be surprised our economies have become a wasteful race of pleasurable consumption.
We're forcing our descendants to subsidize our lifestyle.
I honestly think that in due time (1+ years from now) someone will have figured out a way to recycle those new Apple tech toys. Glue melts, glass and aluminum has different melting points...
I honestly think that people are making a bigger deal out of it than it is. Also, the better something is designed the longer I will personally want to use it. Make stuff out of cardboard, but if it starts falling apart it will end up being thrown out sooner rather than later. My family still uses and owns the iBook G4 I purchased in 2004...
More like "please stop copying Apple's advertisement style". This is getting so out of hand that in Nexus Q case, for instance, you get this beautiful "ad-documentary" with a lot of people saying hyperbolic catch-phrases and not a single clue on what's the product all about...
I mean the visual style - the cameras, use of background music, people reciting "beautiful", "astonishing", "marvelous" things staring at some point right/left of the camera, etc.
As I said, they missed the most important aspect here: showing what the product actually does...
"why not embrace the throwaway culture and just make everything easy and practical to throw away?"
Because enough people say the following:
"I, for one, love my shiny new iPhone each year. No amount of (my own) preaching is going to get me to keep my iPhone 4S when Apple announces the iPhone 5 this year."
I don't think most people say that. Tech geeks certainly do, but they're a minority. And in any case, most people don't have the money to buy a new smartphone every year.
If Apple had an opt-in program where you could upgrade the screen, battery and logic board of your phone for $100, most people would opt for that.
Pray tell though, what affordable semi-conductor material is there out there to replace silicon, that is readily recyclable and achieves the same target?
I fear, too many people want their cake and to eat it too - you want the latest and greatest capabilities (want, not need), but you want them to make it in a way which it will not function, so that you can feel good about it. ("You," being the standard consumer, not any one person in particular.)