This is one reason I believe "right to repair" laws are so important. The environmental damage of producing the device is already done. Make it last as long as possible. Reduce, reuse... then recycle.
Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed... which is what probably scares the corporate oligarchy. If we're not buying new phones every couple of years how will the stock prices keep going up?
Never the less, the devices we make these days can last a long, long time. I've been repairing and maintaining iPhone 5's, 7's, and 8's that are no where near their end of life. The iPhone has a couple of small electrolytic capacitors which should have a useful life of at least 20 years. And can be replaced! The batteries and screens can replaced. These devices can last much longer than we give them credit for.
But tech companies have been struggling to make it illegal or difficult to repair for a long time. I've been seeing photojournalist projects such as this since the late 90s at least (longer perhaps). In North America we had a culture that valued repairing and building things that lasted. It's as good a time as any to push for this to return! Support policy makers that are pushing for right-to-repair and environmental protection!
And pick up a new hobby if you are able. Support your local tech geeks if you can!
>> Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed.
This isn't just the hardware makers, its also software makers.
A ton of the software gets sunset on older versions of Android. Older OnePlus phones, Sony and Google phones are being repurposed for Ubuntu Touch or Sailfish OS because many apps will only work on a specific Android version and up. Same thing with the Google Play store. If you have an older phone that works fine - that's great, too bad none of the software can run on it because modern apps are bloated, you need 12GB of RAM on your phone now. Oh sure you can technically run it, but it won't rune well.
I have three or four Windows phones that still run, but are completely worthless because the software can't be updated because the only browser that you could use was Explorer. Now that MS upgraded to Edge, these phones are worthless. Same thing with the Windows apps. I was able to use One Note on my Lumia 950 just as a stand alone note taker, but now it won't update because MS says it doesn't support that older version and I can't update it.
I agree 100% hardware makers are one of the reasons, but there's a massive issue with the software makers who do the same thing and essentially stop supporting older versions of their software that run fine on these older devices.
It feels like the whole software ecosystem: operating systems, 1st party app and 3rd party app developers, are all conspiring to keep us on the "buy, buy, buy" treadmill. I've got a perfectly good iPhone 7 and quite a few of the apps are no longer even on the app store, and my existing ones are starting to get "upgrades" that put up full-screen modal dialogs telling me the app no longer works on my phone. They can't even let me keep the old working app installed!
Not to even mention my old O.G. iPad 1 and iPhone 4 which both work as perfectly as the day I bought them, except that none of the software works and the app store is a total ghost town. Software developers are mostly to blame for obsoleting perfectly working hardware.
> Software developers are mostly to blame for obsoleting perfectly working hardware.
Is it the developer, say, of some app for Android or iOS, at fault, or is it that the changing API surface coupled with App Store policies means that an app developer is forced to keep releasing new versions and deprecating older operating systems and hardware? I always had the impression that Google and Apple took a very dim view of apps that were stable and not refreshed.
> Is it the developer, say, of some app for Android or iOS, at fault, or is it that the changing API surface coupled with App Store policies means that an app developer is forced to keep releasing new versions and deprecating older operating systems and hardware?
"Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the gnome-core product is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME 2, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks..."
"Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?
But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again."
>It doesn't cost anything or hurt to keep older versions
First, it affects my app ratings in the application store/shop. Some user with 15-year-old device gives me 1-star rating because of some annoying bug that was already fixed 10 years ago but he can not upgrade because that newer version is using a newer API.
Also, what about bugfixes and support? I do not want to have to support (answer emails/calls and deal with bad reviews on all platforms) my ancient version of an app. This would make my app unaffordable for 99% of my users.
> First, it affects my app ratings in the application store/shop
good example of systemic failure - we are destroying a real thing (functionality) to optimise for a fictional thing (rating). There is plenty of old windows software with no support, I have a game that is old enough to drink and it still works and I still sometimes fire it up out of nostalgia.
There is no reason software cannot be like an old motorbike - a 40 year old Honda motorbike can still work, if that’s what the user wants.
> we are destroying a real thing (functionality) to optimise for a fictional thing (rating)
Ratings are quite real. They influence if new people buy your app at all, which influences how viable it is as a business, which influences the app’s future, which influences current customers.
They are constructed reality as opposed to inherent reality. We invented a fake metric then created incentives (adjusting the allocation of real resources) to optimise the fake metric.
It’s not a “fake metric”. It exists, measures something, and it has an effect on the world. It is real. It’s a subpar metric¹, probably even a harmful metric², but that doesn’t make it fake or fictional.
¹ At best it only measures those who rate and it can be gamed (true for every media).
> I’m sure you’re capable of inferring what the OP means.
And it’s that I’m disagreeing with. I’m sure you’re capable of understanding that too. Words matter. By being against something and calling it fake or fictional, you’re doing more harm to your cause than by recognising the impact it has on the real world and those who inhabit it.
They're not a fake metric. Sure, ratings can be gamed and are gamed. But ratings and accompanying reviews inherently aren't fake, and are the closest proxy to "word of mouth"
What you might be missing in your interpretation is that “fictional,” didn’t mean what you’re saying it does.
The OP meant that the app ratings aren’t a measure of a tangible quality or effect. Like “heat,” or “number of tickets.” The unit of measure and what it means is “fictional,” in the sense that the scale and units are completely made up and arbitrary.
They’re not saying that it’s fictional in the sense that it doesn’t exist or isn’t real.
They’re aptly noting that by forcing developers to optimize for this rating system, app stores are incentivizing developers to support only the most recent OS releases and deprecate support for older devices.
Until you bring the online services side into the picture.
A typical app depends on both OS APIs and remote service APIs.
Keeping the latter stable and supported is harder. Especially when there are third party services and frameworks involved, which there inevitably are.
And whereas no-longer-fixable bugs in an app might be work-aroundable, merely annoying, or outright irrelevant to some use cases, bugs in a service/framework can easily be security stuff that can take down your whole business or land you in regulatory hot water.
RHEL 9+ (and as a result, its decedents) is built for x86_64-v2 and has increased RAM requirements for certain installation procedures, so now hundreds/thousands of perfectly functional small servers are no longer able to upgrade (to the next EL version, obviously there are other distributions, but then there's the resource/energy requirement to change everything to something new...) (:
the entirety of computing from top to bottom doesn't give a fuck about the environment. The only way to make this "sustainable" is to slow down and fix/maintain things... but of course that's the antithesis of this world we've built.
One project that I keep coming back to again and again is keeping my circa 2011 netbook functional. It was my main computer for most of grad school, and it seems silly that a perfectly functional bit of hardware (for documents, spreadsheets, etc.) like that doesn't work well.
What I've found is mainstream distros seem to have no respect for aging hardware. Especially if they're desktop-focused. I have had some success with Trisquel[0], netBSD, and FreeDOS. I'm confident I could get Gentoo working if I'm picky about ebuild selection and build everything on a more modern computer, but that does sort of feel like it defeats the purpose. Another option would be maybe to install a version of a mainstream distro from 2011, with the caveat that I'd only be able to install software included on the installation media. Debian Squeeze repos are long gone.
I feel like I shouldn't have to stray so far from the beaten path to do something on a computer from 2011 that I could do comfortably on a Packard Bell in 1992.
[0] On recommendation from an FSF employee. Hardware that can run free software top-to-bottom tends to skew a little older, so Trisquel needs to run well on older hardware.
I have experienced this exact same scenario. I recently started a new job and want to keep my work stuff completely separate and off my personal phone. I fired up my old iPhone 7 and can't even use the Google authenticator app for 2FA to get into my work accounts!
Apps are rarely self-contained you build on layers all the way down to the OS and BIOS/Firmware, I can fire up an old windows or DOS program only because Microsoft still support ancient API's or the BIOS API's still exist on the PC. The older phone processors are still perfectly fine but Apple and Google are not going to support them as they may be slow with new (bloated) code or may not have some fancy feature they use for one tiny part of their latest OS, same with the frameworks that build on top of them and with everything web these days there are a lot of layers.
It's so upsetting. I keep my Pixel 3 as a spare phone. It's perfectly fine, I just used it for 5 days while my primary was on it's own adventure. Perfectly fine, other than it being completely unsupported by Qualcomm and Google, and thus unusable as a daily-driver since banking apps, wallet, etc no longer work, as I've had to move to LineageOS for any sort of updates.
FWIW, rooted LineageOS works pretty well for banking apps, Netflix, etc. It's what I'm using for my daily driver. It takes it takes some fooling around with magisk, zygisk deny, props config, and universal safety net fix; but after you get things initially set up, you just have to re-do magisk after every update and the rest of the settings get restored.
The worst part is how the LineageOS folks and don't want to have anything to do with rooted devices. They seem to think that LOS is actually usable without rooting, but it just isn't in my experience.
> They seem to think that LOS is actually usable without rooting,
Depends on what software you want to run on your device, I guess. I build LineageOS from source, so I'm perfectly capable of rooting my device, but I don't bother.
I don't use Google Play Services, Google Play, or any apps from Google's store at all. Banking apps are not only unnecessary on my phone, but also unwelcome, mainly because they all demand overreaching permissions. I do my banking in a web browser, on a computer. This way, I have more control over what the banking client can do with the device it runs on, and no worries about what might happen to my accounts if my phone is lost or stolen.
With no need to trick software like that into running on my de-googled OS, I haven't had any need to root it.
Ok, that's fair. But you have to admit that there are some limitations imposed on what you can do with your phone.
For example: my bank doesn't accept check deposits via the website, but they do via the app. But the app only works if you're on an "approved" operating system, or if you root the device to tell the app it is. If I didn't use the app, I'd have to go to a bank branch in person, which means a car trip for me.
Similarly, netflix movies and games are only usable on LOS after rooting it. I don't do all that much of either of these, but it's nice to have if I end up stuck in a lobby somewhere for an hour. Odds are good that I won't have a laptop with me.
My credit union supported check deposits via web browser for years, but sadly, they discontinued that feature. I suppose I could switch to a credit union that still supports it, but it turns out my current one also accepts check deposits through the mail (I had to call them to learn this) so I do that instead. I'll keep the feature in mind next time I have reason to switch credit unions.
Netflix and commercial games just aren't priorities for me. I keep e-books on my phone for lobby reading, and F-Droid games can fill more hours than I think I'll ever have to spend.
FWIW, LendingClub, Schwab, Ameriprise, Fidelity have not requested invasive permissions from me. In the least.
However, I spent too much of my 20s futzing with ROMs. I don't doubt that there is a sequence of things to get SafetyNet on Lineage, but it's a losing game. And I refuse to play games like this nowadays, where "my life/time" are the cost I pay. And my lifestyle demands that I have at least backup access on my mobile.
Similarly, my A51 is only like 3-4 years old and it's already being slowly reduced to a useless brick because it only supports 4G which is being phased out and I keep losing connection entirely in some areas. The 85% charging limit has prevented the battery from degrading much over the years so it's still good for more than a day of use even after all this time. It literally works as good as the day I bought it and I'll have to get rid of it soon.
There should be more of a push for backwards compatibility at this sort of protocol level, if we stop supporting 2.4Ghz wifi a metric shit ton of devices will just become junk overnight even if they still work perfectly.
> The 85% charging limit has prevented the battery from degrading much over the years
Sorry, what is that? Is this something everyone knows, or some secret lore. I keep meaning to look up the basics of batteries and prolonging their life, and still haven't got their, so this comment triggers me (in a good way).
I think it's called "protect battery" or something like that in recent versions of Android, it just caps the max voltage your phone will charge to if left connected.
The basic deal is this: lithium cells like being at sort of half charge (typically 3.85V) where they don't degrade and this is called storage charge as a result. It's what any battery that's in a box or on a shelf will be at.
Going above 90% and under 15% (voltages depend on the exact chemistry) will do damage especially if left that way more than a few hours. So if you say, leave your phone on your bedstand to charge overnight, it'll do fast charging (which also does damage btw) and get itself to absolute max in like half an hour and then sit there for another 7-8 hours degrading until you unplug it. That's what this mainly prevents in practical day to day use.
So yeah, for best battery longevity charge with up to 1C (e.g. for a 3Ah battery, that's 3A max), charge in large chunks and try to keep it between 25-85% for the most part. Then you're basically guaranteed to get the max number of cycles out of it.
There's also another great feature called "power saving" which reduces power draw significantly (at least on my phone)by reducing background spying and capping CPU speed so it can last for 3-4 days if I don't use it much, which again saves a lot of charge cycles.
The problem with software support is that it costs a lot to keep old versions around, and even to keep drivers for old hardware around. Even if there weren't perverse incentives to brick old phones to sell new hardware, it's very hard to imagine that any company would keep old software working for free like this. Windows, which did aim to keep back compact and support relatively old devices in its day was quite expensive for its time, and upgrades were not free either.
Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft effectively have infinite money. It’s not a cost issue for them.
And if it’s a nuisance for them, they could release the specs and source code. The source code is effectively worthless to them. Why bother withholding it when it could be used to maintain old devices?
They also have very large software footprints, and enough bugs in their latest/supported versions that it is difficult to justify taking resources from latest to support to older versions with dwindling user base.
I know the software upgrade cycle is frustrating but if you’ve ever tried to both release new features and maintain legacy versions of software you know how complex that quickly becomes.
It is not simply a matter of releasing legacy source code. Modern software is extraordinarily complex and interwoven. Modern software doesn’t just run in one place, it exists across a multitude of systems and services, each with their own contracts and interfaces that evolved over time. There is a reason these companies have tens of thousands of engineers maintaining their code bases. Not to mention there are very real concerns about proprietary information, as many components of legacy systems are present in derived forms in their successors.
I’m all about right repair - especially for hardware - but it’s a bit naive to think that we’ll find nirvana in opening up legacy source code. I know it’s a tinkerer’s dream to dive through old versions of software you used to run and add your own little personal features, but realistically it would do nothing to move the needle much on actual public use of legacy software. Don’t forget the average user often cannot even troubleshoot why their printer is not working, let alone install, run, and troubleshoot a custom android stack on their 2006 Nokia.
I've been a professional software developer for over twenty years and writing software since I was a kid in the late 80s. I understand why it's hard supporting old platforms.
The source code is worthless. It's just one way a company could extend support for older platforms they've given up on supporting. It's not valuable for them to hold on to the sources.
We could all huddle around the existing Unices and BSDs and try to keep the forks going for older platforms. That's fine too.
But the original sources may have hints about how to support some of the custom hardware for a given platform that would be useful, etc.
It really wouldn't be hard for them to just say, "Okay, here's the source for the last build 12.x.x known to run on hardware revision 1.x.x," and leave it at that. Doesn't cost anyone anything.
Update: What's trickier perhaps is supporting older platforms through emulation and only having binaries. Just open the source, Luke.
Refurbish and repairing viable electronics does not help keep Apple's, Google's or any manufacturer's stock high. Stock spikes high when the news organizations can talk about all the latest hardware and how sales doing well. Why would those companies CEOs want to hurt their golden package before exiting the industry?
One way to start penetrating right-to-repair would be to force device unlocking after ownership, device payed off, and end-of-life classification by the manufacture.
Next step would be for the manufacturers to require publishing open documents for 3rd party support without having to sign a NDA.
Both of those require reverse engineering. With camera technology being so complex, this is the feature that limits alternative OS usage with continual security updates after the manufactures give up.
Maybe rephrasing right-to-repair as "consumer protection" could help push it through better with less tech savvy consumers.
Consumers aren't the issue. Consumer support for right to repair is broad. The issue is the government doesn't give a shit what consumers think the vast majority of the time, they're bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists.
Consumer support for right to repair is broad, so long as it comes at no cost to them. People don’t want to pay to fix things, and they don’t want to accept any reduction in performance either.
So your environment isn't overflowing with pollution and single use junk? So there are more natural resources for your kids to enjoy? So you don't have to keep breaking in a new pair every other month?
But the consumer mind goes like “whatever, my backyard garden looks fine, my lawn looks green, my kids will be fine, besides whatever I throw away helps some third world poor person make a living, so win win, not my problem…”
The problem I wanted to make is that, consumer who can afford to generate those e-wastes are very far removed from the consequences of their action. When the consequences of my action are not inflicted on me, I have no incentive to stop doing bad things.
If resources are shrinking, price of products made from those resources should be higher.
Problem is, when stupid design and bad quality of making product steps in. I would like to buy a pair of shoes or smartphone that last ages and are repairable. Usually those products are thrown away because of one faulty piece that is impossible to change for new one that would fix whole product.
This just isn't true, as long as there's repair shops out with a sizable customer base. The issue is companies do everything in their power to make it impossible for that service to exist. It also largely depends on the economy; If the economy is great, people throw their old stuff away and buy new stuff. If money is tight, they repair it, and if there's an economic collapse they let it stay broken. I wonder where we are?
Unfortunately, it depends on the mentality. My well off friends often pay good money up front to buy the latest and hold onto a device(smartphone, laptop, sometimes tablets etc.) for 5-7 years.
My less well off or broke friends show the opposite, they often go out of their way to take debt(contracts, installments, pay later etc.) and continue upgrading to latest phone/watch/tablet/fitness tracker every year. It feels like that there is some kind of overcompensation combined with FOMO involved.
I don’t want to generalise this, but I had known probably a sub three figure people from my childhood and have seen this same behavior repeated always.
One of my friend in marketing told me that, people buy dreams, and hope that a new dream will help them forget the nightmares/problems, hence all adverts often include happy smiling beautiful people or conveys some form of freedom, prestige, social status …
Yeah, when we make generalizations like that we have to assume rational actors in the same earning bracket. I was also describing people outside the US where people are a bit less willing to buy the new thing every year if they can't afford it. Ukraine before the war, for example, had a massive economic crash and no one could afford to repair their computers anymore which put most repair shops out of business.
consumers are 100% the issue. consumers choose what to buy, who to buy from, and how often. Why should government need to step in and what is government going to do? Tell people who to buy from?
100%? Does that apply to other things that needed government intervention, like child labor, company towns, etc?
I don't see a problem with making rules for companies to follow. We have a rules that say companies can't advertise nicotine to children or put lead in gasoline. If the rule is good, it should be around.
I try to make stuff last as long as possible - not because it saves the environment or even saves me money. Making old stuff last a long time (seemingly) gives me an endorphin hit.
That being said, I get an even bigger endorphin hit from knowing that people can (mostly) buy whatever they want, even if stupid, unnecessary and wasteful by my criteria.
> consumers choose what to buy, who to buy from, and how often.
Sure, but when companies can all collectively decide that they're only going do one thing, you either stop consuming entirely or put up with the abuse.
> Why should government need to step in
Because companies won't do it on their own.
> what is government going to do?
Write right to repair legislature. None of these are difficult problems, you just seem to have a libertarian mindset which inevitably means you just play defense for corporations doing whatever they want.
> One way to start penetrating right-to-repair would be to force device unlocking after ownership, device payed off, and end-of-life classification by the manufacture.
This would really not help much, unless there was some type of PC-like ABI driver standard that could ensure that devices could remain supported in operating systems without having to "support" each device individually. And even then...
> Next step would be for the manufacturers to require publishing open documents for 3rd party support without having to sign a NDA.
I think this is even desirable in the PC world. I do not want AMD publishing drivers for Linux; I want AMD publishing absolutely free and complete specifications, possibly even a reference implementation, and mandated by law.
A large part of the problem is ARM itself and the ecosystem around it. Broadcom, Qualcomm and the rest of the closed source driver/firmware mafia who make it physically impossible for anyone to support their SoCs even if they wanted to.
> Why would those companies CEOs want to hurt their golden package before exiting the industry?
Due to a sense of decency and humanity and a realisation they have more than they could ever spend and could be happy working to leave the world better than they found it?
Wow, I’m sorry, just got woozy there for a moment, must be all the fumes. Nice dream, though.
It's a software problem too. To have the same capabilities my phone did when it was new a few years ago, I have to find 3rd party play store backups to get apps with the right SDK to install. The bootloader isn't unlockable. Samsung won't provide updates. Google is actively hostile to providing apps which work (both not hosting the working versions and abusing things like their power over the signing keys to quickly deprecate old Android SDKs).
> (both not hosting the working versions and abusing things like their power over the signing keys to quickly deprecate old Android SDKs)
Android SDKs aren't getting deprecated. The SDK available on developer.android.com right now can still be used to build an app that runs on devices all the way down to Android 1.5. It's the developers who are dropping older Android versions by raising the minSDK in their apps.
Google Play does allow the developer to keep older app versions available for older Android versions. Again, most developers don't do that.
Google themselves support older Android versions for a very long time. Current versions of GSF and Google Play require Android 4.4, iirc. This came out more than 10 years ago.
yep - my old moto phone was fine, and I didn't add any new apps or desire new functionality, but performance got so bad over time to the point where it was unusable. There's really no attractive business model today in maintaining modest device usage over a long period of time.
One of the nasty impacts comes from the low-tech metal recovery
process that washes out heavy metals like cadmium, mercury, lead,
arsenic into the sea. Fish from the West coast of Africa are basically
lethal to eat.
Did a podcast with a researcher named Gerry McGovern (World Wide
Waste) on this a couple of years ago [0].
Something that impedes recycling and repair is status display. I
was proud of the old Nokia I kept for 10 years, all stuck together with
tape, despite the scowls and snickers from the crowd with their latest
iPhone who supposed I must be some freakish homeless person who
wandered in - instead of their project leader/CTO. That was back in
the days when meetings always started with an animalistic display of
getting your tech out on the table to pose with. Somehow that little
Nokia really emasculated and pissed them off. These were the same
people who could talk about "efficiency" all day long, but the actual
reality of doing more with less undermined some more powerful, lower
drive.
Recycling is definitely one area of engineering that is under appreciated and difficult.
The tech involved in recycling solar panels. Sheesh. Specialized equipment and patented processes. All to separate polymers from the metals and minerals. It’s currently more expensive than mining new material. The challenge will be to make it affordable enough that it makes sense.
But general electronic waste? I can’t even imagine. It sucks that instead of answering the challenge the world is collectively shrugging and dumping it in places like Ghana.
Update: Part of the recycling equation is not only designing electronics to be repaired and re-used but also designing them to be easier to recycle. In the solar panel field there are experimental designs that give new panels the same durability and life expectancy without the polymers which would reduce the cost of recycling them at end-of-life quite significantly.
Computing is... going in a different direction. Optimizing density at the component level makes for more power-efficient designs and some efficiency in the supply chain... but it makes recycling and repair waaaaaaaay harder. Not sure it's worth the effort tbh.
It is for the gold. So much that in the UK we had our Royal Mint start
a proper industrial pipeline for e-waste [0].
What I found heartbreaking from the stories from India, China and
Africa is that mainly kids of about 8 - 16 yo work on illegal
recycling.
They smash up the e-waste by hand, so they're breathing in dust clouds
of plastic and metal particles, PFAS, glass fragments, PCB... Then
they wash out the recoverables using a light aqua-regia (mix of nitric
and hydrochloric acid). The industrial health effects are
unimaginable.
EDIT: Just saw your update and concur that design-for-RRR is the way
forward.
So many devices are general purpose computers that are treated like a specialized device.
eg: modern games consoles. A Nintendo 3DS is an ARM11 board. You can run Linux on it. Most people don’t because it doesn’t look like a “computer.” And because they wouldn’t know how as it takes a very specific skill set to make it work.
They do get reused a lot because gamers of that era tend to value them… but a device like that could have tons of useful applications to extend its life.
A fold-up computer with built in wifi that runs on battery? Nice. With enough around you could run a low-power mesh network in an emergency to keep communication open between folks that are separated.
But such repurposing is far outside of most people’s reach. Especially when we’re trained to think of these things as products.
Phones are another one. An iPhone 5 could easily be repurposed into a firewall or other application to extend its usefulness and lifetime. It’s a general purpose computer crippled into being a product though.
> Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed...
You buy a device with a rechargeable battery, the device has an expected lifetime of 15 years but the battery is dead after 5. I try to open the device, but it’s clearly not designed to be opened.
After prying with knives, etc I get it open and see that it’s not a standard cell, like 18650, but a custom pack.
I emailed the manufacturer and they reply with ‘we don’t make it any more’
So I am on to my 3rd beard trimmer. And I buy the most expensive model available, it’s not like I am cheating out.
Same issue with wireless mice, keyboards, everything
Ye, I think a lot of deal Chinese in gets is unfair
They optimise for different criteria. Westerners need a $thing$ to work for 5 years and never break. If it breaks, just getting a repairmen to get off his arse and come to your house is like £150. So it’s better to get an expensive $thing$ that never breaks
But in China, getting a repair guy is easy, so it’s better to get a cheaper $thing$ that’s easy to repair
We need a law that requires manufacturers to, in the very least, provide the documentation and keys to install an open source OS on their devices when they drop support for the things.
There are actually reasons that phones specifically can't last 20 years: We keep changing wireless standards. When it was mandated that all phones in the US must support VoLTE, I had two phones that were instantly turned into e-waste: An aging Xperia XA2 (that I miss dearly) and an ASUS ROG Phone 2 (good riddance) that was only 6 months old. Until we can come up with an energy-efficient and tamper-resistant SDR for phones, this will be the hard limiting factor for useful phone age.
I tend to go to my local town's e-waste collection at the end of every month in search of interesting gems to take home and repair. I find that the majority of e-waste that I see is 10+ year old tvs, 15+ year old Desktop pcs from the P4/core 2 era, and broken LCDs (as in the screen is cracked). Maybe my town is just really frugal but it seems like home users really do hold onto their devices for quite a while.
One thing I do see more often is really low end stuff: generic Chromebooks, all those Chinese knockoffs of popular items (tablets, picture frames etc.). No name electronics (ie Speakers, mp3 players, other consumer electronic junk.) Anything moderately mid tier or higher is used until the 10+ year mark. I suspect that all these items never really saw much use to begin with and with the low spec nature of many of these items, even if they were fully open what could people really do with most of them?
I still totally agree with your stance but I am not sure how much of the bulk it would reduce.
Too true. Elsewhere in the comments we've been discussing the third R(ecycling) when it comes to general electronics. A tough problem... one that has so far been tackled by making it someone else's problem. Usually people who don't have the logistics and technology to handle it.
> I've been repairing and maintaining iPhone 5's, 7's, and 8's that are no where near their end of life.
There's an iPhone 6 I've come into possession of because someone I know was throwing theirs away, so I asked could I have it to play with. I notice you conspicuously said 5, 7 and 8. What software do you run on them to keep them going? As far as I understand it, there's no alternative app stores or ROMs to flash on iPhones. And is there anything about the 6 I should know?
Great comment anyway, I'm in full agreement - making devices last longer is essential, empowering and fun.
Brilliant, I had seen Project Sandcastle but it hadn't popped into my head since acquiring this little old machine. I'll absolutely look into if it can be done on the 6, cheers!
> Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed... which is what probably scares the corporate oligarchy
I agree with you. Reusing and repairing appliances flies in the face of current capitalism. We don't need new models of phones, laptops or cars every year. Sadly I'm not optimistic that we will be able to dial back greed any time soon.
It's a loose concept, a bag of things including basic human behaviour/self interest, mutually beneficial transactions between willing participants and the rules provided by governments.
The process of developing capitalism has taken millennia and in the last few centuries has had far more intellectual horsepower put into it than developing phones. Lots of iterations have been tried, it can't be compared to a beta product at all. The major problem we have on that front is people keep trying to regress backwards to models of organisation that have already been tried and are well understood not to work effectively - because almost nobody votes based on historical learnings.
Once we have >100 years experience in building phones there probably won't be annual upgrades any more either, it'll be like-for-like replacements.
What do you count as iterations? There's never been a violent throwing out of capitalism to be tried with a different version of capitalism. The throwing out of capitalism has been to replace it with something else, not more capitalism. And has the horsepower been put into developing capitalism, or has it been put into making more money for the people wielding it, rather than developing the best system there could be?
Why does it have to be violent? Every election heralds a slightly different version of capitalism based on the regulatory and tax priorities of who is now in charge.
Edit: Think of it in software terms. Version 1.1 or even 2.0 is normally not a complete rewrite of version 1.0, instead it's an iterative set of changes. Rewrites are often considered to be a bad idea.
Capitalism concentrates power to the top; those powerful people are the ones who have had the power to reinvent it so far. E.g. in 2008 when the Fed began QE Infinity, which never ended.
Capitalism has actually been reinvented many times - basically every time there's a significant change in how the Federal Reserve operates, this is a reinvention of capitalism. It occurred memorably in 2008 and recently in 2024. This new 2024 version hasn't had time to reach a stable state yet. It was preceded by cryptocurrency bubble capitalism since 2020.
Every single thread has someone complaining about capitalism. It's childish, and more importantly, not interesting. We get it, capitalism bad, but communists produce even more e-waste.
Capitalism is the system we are in which is the system that creates the actual problems of this system. We are talking about the actual problems in real life and not the theoretical problems that may exist in a parallel universe.
People should understand that proper clean electronic waste recycling does exist.
This story isn't so much about "we need to stop consuming new electronics" as it is "we need to ensure that electronic waste doesn't end up being dumped on random impoverished towns in Africa".
These guys are burning off the insulation from wires when there are simple cheap machines that automatically strip it all off. This is more a portrayal of extreme poverty than anything.
I second this opinion. Here's an older article which is less dramatised and talks about attempted interventions such as trying to get the recyclers to use wire strippers instead of burning: https://www.worstpolluted.org/projects_reports/display/107
I'm pretty sure at the rates they get paid they'd be better off selling the wire strippers and keep burning the insulation.
Like this is Marie Antoinette tier behavior of someone so out of touch with reality from their own privilege they can't even see it. "Hello, I, a benevolent westerner have bestowed upon you a dirt cheap tool so you can keep digging through cancerous muck for pennies. Am I not a gracious god? Thanks bye"
Not only that. It feels like we (commenting as a U.S. reader seeing that one of the two organizations in the link behind the campaign is based out of N.Y.) are telling them how they should be playing with our waste after it has been discarded to them.
To be fair, the article cites "occupational" hazards in addition to the "ecological" ones, albeit with less (IMO) emphasis. I would hope that the actual campaign efforts in the field focused largely on those during outreach to recyclers.
I do agree with that, but at the exact same time, it is important to be critical of these actions and to understand our role and part in this. For me, thinking about this logically leads me to the conclusion that, while individual action can be good-willed, it is not enough to fix a systemic problem. Systemic problems need to be fixed with systemic actions, and that first step requires people to recognize and understand the problem.
The point that I read in your GP comment - and that I agree with - is that solutions need to be local: attuned to the local environment, which tends to imply invented by local people.
C.f. Mpesa; westerners generally wouldn't think of payment over SMS, because they don't have the right lenses.
Yeah i struggle with this as well. I don't know who GP is and maybe they are doing a ton, but every time I read a comment like this I think of a similar thing:
"Hello, I, a benevolent westerner am tasked with explaining how poor you are to others but will never think of you after today or do anything to improve your condition. However, I am very serious about my role of explaining how anyone that trys to help or implement incremental solutions is a bad person."
As an electrical engineer I am with you. There are machines to cut the cables and shred printed circuit boards to smallest pieces and recycle all the valuable materials. Even sort out plastic enclosure parts or glass by corresponding densities.
But the world is run by greedy bastards who don’t care about anything else than their own pockets. That’s how plastic gets ditched in the ocean. That’s how electronics get shipped to this e-waste dumping ground. Or old ships end up in Bangladesh.
I red probably too many science fiction books about future utopias, that the present makes me sad. Heck they can’t get the damn local commuter train line to run according the schedule in apparently wealthy part of Germany. Just shaking my head.
A big part of that is the devalued Yen, which is a recent phenomenon (~2-3y). Travelers with USD or EUR are going to think everything's cheap because of this.
But even ignoring the exchange rate (this is easy to do: just assume 100 yen = USD$1, like in the mid-2010s), most of the trains (or subways) are really cheap compared to costs I've seen in other countries (US/EU), and far better run on top of that.
> There are machines to cut the cables and shred printed circuit boards to smallest pieces and recycle all the valuable materials. Even sort out plastic enclosure parts or glass by corresponding densities.
I'd love to learn more about this. What's the state of the art? How do the economics work out?
For now, I take my end-of-life electronics to the local BestBuy. They have pretty good recycling standards, which include attempts to reuse & refurbish devices:
The thing is that the economics are poor. Why? Because additional processing step of these materials in recycling plant produces worse quality materials that need purifying again if used for production. Except copper of course.
And there should be two viewpoints: one is the cheapest way of getting the raw materials for production of other things. And the second is the clean way of getting rid of tons of electronics waste. Think about shelves of 17” first generation LCDs. Still not broken, but just outdated. The second one imho justifies the higher costs of materials. But if someone will pay let’s say 5% more for a television that was produced from recycled material… I don’t know. I see everywhere around greenwashing and I would not trust this anymore.
The people who decide that the dumping should happen are rich. They make the decision either by directly ordering it, or sometimes indirectly by arranging things so the poor people have no other choice.
When I was in school there was some discussion of the product lifecycle which included some engineering considerations for recycling. It seems to me the consumer electronics industry has become actively hostile not just to repair but also safe recycling.
From a short-term capitalistic perspective, this is correct. The cost of the toxic materials generated from burning is externalized to all of us who are stuck on this rock.
> we need to ensure that electronic waste doesn't end up being dumped on random impoverished towns in Africa
Wouldn't this further impoverish those who get work from said dumps?
The real issue seems to be that they have no alternatives. If they could get a $5000/Yr job making textiles there'd be no appetite for diving into rubbish.
Iunno, I think the only way to do that would be to ban all textile imports in those places, which would make every non-textile worker poorer.
Lots of places try to ban 2nd hand imports, but I think that just leads to poor quality “new” imports from even cheaper countries that have industrialized textile manufacturing.
Unsure what it would take for them to become competitive textile producers but that’s what would work the best in the end.
Maybe I’ve taken too many (one) economics courses…
>People should understand that proper clean electronic waste recycling does exist. [..] This is more a portrayal of extreme poverty than anything.
That like saying "people should understand that eating cake is also an option, you don't have to eat dirt".
Because then answer me why most e-waste dumping gets shipped off to those impoverished countries instead of being processed locally using the "cheap and clean" ways you mention, directly in the rich western nations who are buying all those electronics in the first place.
Throwing the blame back on the poor countries getting exploited by corporate interest of rich western countries doing greenwashing, feels like gaslighting.
> Throwing the blame back on the poor countries getting exploited by corporate interest of rich western countries doing greenwashing
That's not what the person you're replying to said at all:
> we need to ensure that electronic waste doesn't end up being dumped on random impoverished towns in Africa
The point is that recycling isn't the problem, it's the companies who direct the waste. Nobody is blaming the third world countries for these problems. Holding these examples of terrible conditions up as evidence that recycling doesn't work just gives recycling a bad reputation rather than showing the irresponsibility of the companies that put the waste there in the first place. Neither the producers nor the recipients of the waste decided for it to be this way, it's the people in the middle.
I cannot find any source that shows e-waste being primarily sent to third world countries. It looks like it mostly goes to India and China, if not processed locally.
And at least in India it doesn't look like a burning hell hole of toxic waste.[1]
> Having long invaded Asia (Russia, India, China, etc.), e-waste from Europe and the United States is arriving in extensive quantities in the ports of West African countries such as Ghana, in violation of international treaties.
This is from the first link[1] in the npr article. It doesn't say that it is the primary destination but does say that it is high.
I'm speculating here, but its possibly because labor in the USA is too expensive to make this type of work economical, even if we have the tools. Most of the time I would repair things when they break but the hourly rate of repair shops is more expensive than a replacement. Overseas they have cheap labor but apparently not the tools. It seems like an opportunity for a charity to send some of these tools to Ghana along with each shipment of e-waste.
I get money back when I trade in my phone. Give me back less. It's not like I want a box of old devices that I don't need or use, and I suspect most other folks would feel the same. Take some of that money and put it towards recycling the devices properly.
yeah, it's interesting seeing some vintage used parts show up for sale from China on eBay from refurbishers (e.g. a SODIMM for a 20 year old laptop), but not a thing from Ghana.
It’s so easy to just mindlessly want and consume until you see pictures like these. They show that although my streets are pristine, with everyone having the latest “stuff”, it’s really only possible because we sweep all of the “bad stuff” under the proverbial rug
I can consume less, give new life to old electronics, etc. and seeing these pictures validates the feeling I have for it.
At the same time it just makes me feel powerless, all the effort I go through to not make this problem bigger is all too small to have any effect, the powerlessness against the system is real. I can change my habits, advocate for others why I believe that's good but it all fall into deaf ears while the incentives are there to just consume, throw it away, rinse and repeat.
It just makes me exhausted while not feeling I've helped to make the world any better, and in the end I still get flak from the mindless consumers if I bring this up as it's a damn boring subject to participate when one doesn't care about it.
To many people don't value values or morals, and only prioritize their own experiences. I find it hard to maintain relationships with people who only talk about their career, business and consumption, as it is hard to have any kind of discussion about "we COULD, but SHOULD we" in regards to purchasing the latest car, iphone, a new house etc.
That's how it always was. People were eating only the best parts of the animal and dumping the rest. More over, the best is converted mostly to sh*t and dumped too. Fish do the same.
No, that is a relatively recent development. There are many old recipes involving body parts of animals that many people no longer consider eating these days. Back then, as many parts of the animal were used for consumption or other use as possible.
My understanding is that the modern meatpacking industry is very efficient at turning those parts into sausages, highly-processed meat products, pet food, animal feed, and fertilizer.
> People were eating only the best parts of the animal and dumping the rest.
That's not true. As recently as 50 years ago my relatives had pigs and they ate or otherwise used every single part of the animal, even the teeth, without throwing anything out. And they weren't poor, either. It was simply a mindset of utilizing what you have to the best of your ability.
To be fair, part of the feel good for consume is the recycling centers in the west that are largely complete scams. Because they just aggregate the waste to ship to the third world for """"recycling""""
>political science Professor at the University of Pisa in Italy, says: ‘If hazardous waste leaves European ports illegally, that’s because it’s easier to export illegally from [European ports] than to import to the European Union (EU).’ He says while Europeans control what enters their soil, ‘they don’t care very much about what is exported from their countries.’
Wait til you find out about disposable vaporizers people buy in the states, use up in a week, and throw out. Those don't even get a chance to be recycled, and they're a relatively complex electronic.
I live in the US. Those are insane. I can’t believe how quickly they became normal. Not only will they definitely cause cancer, but they are a cancer on the planet too. And they’re marketed like toys.
From a health and harm reduction perspective they are probably saving lives by replacing cigarette smoke which is much more harmful. But I agree that from an environmental perspective they are much worse. Perfectly good Li-ion are thrown in the trash which is insane.
I don't understand why people buy these. I don't vape, but it is my understanding that you can get reusable vapes with cartridges that are very easy to replace, and which are probably more enjoyable to use.
> From a health and harm reduction perspective they are probably saving lives by replacing cigarette smoke which is much more harmful.
There is some evidence that they are used by people who never smoked, though. The smoking reduction seems like a convenient excuse for these companies. In actual fact smokers or former-smokers is a limited and dwindling market. They want to expand aggressively, notably in younger populations.
As someone who recently quit vaping I can shed some light.
My understanding is that the FDA recently banned flavored vapes, however the wording of the rule made some reference to the ban being for “cartridge-based” vapes, presumably to target Juul over roll-your-own-vape-juice type systems.
This lead to a loophole where the disposable vapes, being disposable and not cartridge based, can be flavored.
There's no world in which atomized nicotine, glycol/glycerin, and some flavors, is comparable, let alone worse, than inhaling smoldering tobacco leaves. Even the purest, organic tobacco made from the nicest leaves lovingly collected by happy family farmers, is still gonna give you cancer if you burn it and inhale the smoke. That's just chemistry.
The only exception is if the vape juice contains something it "shouldn't", like the vitamin E acetate debacle, but if you put the same wrong things in tobacco, you get the same issue. This problem is avoided entirely with a verified source of ingredients.
Partial combustion products will always contain, at minimum, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a verified carcinogen. The hotter the conditions, the more complex the precursors, and the more incomplete the reaction is, the more nasty junk you will create. Vaping might or might not be bad, but the chemistries of smoking includes the full set of chemistries of vaping, and then way way more, due to the incomplete combustion of the much larger molecules in plant matter.
Bottom line: probably don't put the volatile reaction products of substances heated above 100°C into your lungs: tobacco smoke, vape, campfire smoke, car exhaust, brake dust, etc. But some reactants are far worse than others.
I bet you, with the advent of the FDA banning flavored products, we will see the same for form factors. The pleasant-looking disposable vapes are neon colors and look like toys, just like you said.
This is of course untrue, given that we know that there are people who have changed their behaviour after learning about realities through articles such as this one. And a huge percentage of people still haven't learned about them. In one's highly-educated HN-reading savvy bubble, it might be easy to assume that surely by now everyone knows the realities, has seen all of them, and if they behave a certain way it's simply due to the degree to which they care.
I've been prone to such biases myself, but the truth is very different. Billions of people, including hundreds of millions in wealthy regions, still simply do not know about this. They genuinely do not know that e.g. plastic recycling is a fantasy. They have not seen these images. Of course, many have and just don't care as long as their streets are pristine - the people you're talking about very much exist. But there's even more people who are simply unaware.
It's very easy to take a nihilist view that nothing matters, as it completely absolves oneself of any potential responsibility whatsoever. But it doesn't reflect reality.
> It's very easy to take a nihilist view that nothing matters, as it completely absolves oneself of any potential responsibility whatsoever
No! I actually do take personal responsibility by:
• Living in a small apartment in a dense city
• Never having driven a car - I never even learned to drive
• Never flying in an airplane – last flight was 10+ years ago and have no plans to fly again
• Eating a plant-based diet
• Not ever having kids
But I will concede that none of those things matter.
> This is of course untrue, given that we know that there are people who have changed their behaviour after learning about realities through articles such as this one.
That is neat! People in general will not change their behavior.
Commendable lifestyle! We live in almost the same way :)
> That is neat! People in general will not change their behavior.
Unless you rolled out of the womb with the plans to live in the manner you've described, there must at some point have been things that changed your behavior. Out of everyone living like you and me globally, the ones who have been raised by their parents to do so are a really tiny minority. I've lived on two opposite sides of the globe, and in both places they count for <1%. The rest of us has implemented lifestyle changes after being faced with realities.
> Unless you rolled out of the womb with the plans to live in the manner you've described, there must at some point have been things that changed your behavior.
Honestly probably just the result of having weird parents who didn’t discourage weird decisions by me as a kid. We lived in a small house (without air conditioning) in Florida and spent summers on an even smaller (and even hotter) wooden sailboat.
So I was never afraid of doing things most people wouldn’t consider just to see what would happen.
And even more honestly I just like living this way.
If the Earth was cooling down and we had to warm the planet up by driving more or whatever I’d live the same way I do now because I like it. I wouldn’t care about doing the right thing for the planet.
So I can’t fault the people who just like living a different way that happens to bad for the planet. They like their lives so let ‘em go nuts.
>No! I actually do take personal responsibility by:
None of these are taking responsibility. This is just a normal nihilistic life style being spun as meaningful behavior. You not having kids isn't making a sacrifice because there is no world in which you have kids.
> You not having kids isn't making a sacrifice because there is no world in which you have kids.
Can you point out where I said these things were a sacrifice?
I actually don’t think any of those things are sacrifices — they all add to my quality of life. Obviously I have to guess on the kids thing and I can’t be 100% sure about the driving thing, but I’ve flown before and it sucks. I live in a smaller apartment now than I did when I was younger. I ate meat for decades. So I know the alternatives.
> You not having kids isn't making a sacrifice because there is no world in which you have kids.
Of course there is! I have just chosen to not make that world a reality.
> This is just a normal nihilistic life style being spun as meaningful behavior
Then the same can be said of somebody who says that eating meat and having kids is good?
What lifestyle isn’t nihilistic by your definition?
I don't think GP is saying nothing matters, they are objecting to the idea that the way to make systemic change happen is to convince individuals to change personal behaviors through moral persuasion.
We have, however, had some success at taking collective action; compare trying to convince individuals to make a moral decision not to use disposable technologies with a regulation that requires manufacturers to make their products repairable/recyclable/etc.
Counterpoint to most of the posts here - I don’t see this and think “wow we should stop using things”, I see this and think “wow, we need to sort out governance / fix poverty”.
A well run landfill looks nothing like this and these are in no way a foregone conclusion of someone throwing away an old iPhone 3 or whatever.
There is no more correlation here than with, say, Newton has the apple fall and then we cut to scenes of firebombing.
If I go to the loo and my water company decides it's cheaper to dump human faeces in the middle of the M1 motorway than to dispose of it properly, the solution isn't for me to stop going to the loo, it's to force my water company to stop doing that.
Which in turn will mean more expensive products. Products of imaginary Company A, which is responsible, will be more expensive than products of Company B, which can use all the tricks to be cheap (e.g. conflict minerals, child/slave labour, bribing^W lobbying government officials to take their e-waste).
And which products will the consumer buy? The better priced one...
Part of "making them pay" is making all of the companies pay, which makes your argument sort of moot. If not all companies are being made to pay, then you haven't done anything.
I have iPad 2 Retina. Screen still is great, battery allow for hours of playing, but it stays at iOS 12. Even Github doesn't work correctly there, because we moved onto super-extra-required-new-crazy-stuff in JS area.
It's so trashy for me I gave it for 2-year-old on the trip and she pushed the home button so hard it's not working anymore, but iOS 12 allowed to just swipe from bottom, so device is still ok.
The only thing I can do with it is to throw it away, because Apple in Poland redirects to some garbage collecting company and even in US the device is worth 0$. I think materials and working Retina screen is worth much more than nothing. Great quality build, great hardware set, 64G memory. Much better than current models. But it still is a trash and waste for planet :( Sad.
I just sold one of these last year on a local marketplace website. Mine had a working home button but was otherwise similar to yours. I think I got $40 USD for it.
I feel like there's probably someone out there who would still get some use out of it if you gave it away, and might even be willing to pay you a small amount of money for it.
Scavenging e-waste for components feels so cyberpunk.
Sometime someone designed an IC, lithographed it on a high tech factory, soldered it onto a PCB and now it lies under your feet like billions of other rusty sharp parts, as if they were potato skins or plastic bags.
Just a few decades ago nations would start WW3 over this alien technology dump. Now they try find cheaper ways to sneak more waste into it.
We did war over energy, now we burn energy just to find out who can burn the most and give them a token (bitcoin) or get neighbors to fight each other on which can get the biggest SUV or sports car that guzzles like 2 or more optimized cars.
I just replaced an electric stove top unit because the old one had a burner that wouldn’t turn off. I still haven’t figured out what to do with the old unit; a local e-waste recycling group doesn’t want it, I don’t know anyone that wants a partially functioning stovetop, I don’t want to fix it myself… but I guess I can pay to bring it to the local landfill.
Anyone claiming that “right to repair” fixes any of this is missing the part where people don’t want to spend their lives repairing everything they have. Also, the new stovetop is far more energy efficient than the old one with is yet another balancing aspect of replacing old tech.
Right to repair just means for those that do want to repair it, they can without any undue burden.
If you don't want to repair it, nobody is forcing you to! Just throw it away like you would have done anyways.
The point of right to repair is that there is a non-zero amount of people who want to repair stuff and it shouldn't cost the people who don't anything extra... It's a "right" not an "obligation"...
> I still haven’t figured out what to do with the old unit
I don't have a success percentage to offer you, but I've seen quite a lot of that kind of thing in the "free" section of Craigslist. There are all kinds of folks who grab that stuff for parts, for the challenge, or who knows
I've also seen mixed opinions about the best way to use that section: one audience thinks "put it on the curb, announce the fact you did so, the end" and the other audience is against that because it could cause multiple people to drive to what could be an empty curb by the time they get there. I'd say go with whichever causes you the least emotional stress: fielding bazillions of Craigslist emails or running the risk of inadvertent climate change contributions
> I don’t know anyone that wants a partially functioning stovetop
Maybe some repair shop wants to buy it cheap, to repair, and to sell for profit? Or not buy, but to repair it to you for a fraction of the price of a new stove top?
> Also, the new stovetop is far more energy efficient than the old one with is yet another balancing aspect of replacing old tech.
This is the killer. If new things are better then it may be not economically viable to repair.
Put it up on craigslist (or whatever is popular in your area) for free and label it "as-is, needs repair". Odds are decent that someone will take it off your hands with the intention of fixing it and getting a free stove top.
you just admitted that you're the problem. "new stovetop is far more energy efficient than the old one" how so? does it magically produce more heat from nothing?
That's a nonsensical thing to say. An electric cooktop using heated rings is indisputably less efficient than an induction cooktop. It simply doesn't get all of its energy into the cookware.
What's the parent commenter supposed to do? Live without a stovetop because the old one can't be fixed?
I’m thankful I saw these pictures, if deeply unsettled.
We can’t (just) take an individualized approach to a solution, which is an artifact of the 80s and 90s when corporations and governments shifted responsibility to the individual to recycle a water bottle, for example.
It seems like the best solution is to impose a waste reduction fee that is built into price that pays for ewaste reduction. This could empower Ghanaians to build out this as a safer industry.
How much would that fee be? And who would spend the political capital to enact such a tariff? That’s the part that feels impossible.
Correct. Some friends and I started saying "throw it aways" instead. I think it much better describes the actual situation. It didn't really catch on, though I wish it would.
This is awful on so many levels. These images should be postered around the headquarters of all major electronics manufacturers. They should be used in courts as prosecution evidence to force these companies to comply with repairability regulations, and force governments to enact stricter regulations and higher fines. They can start by making planned obsolescence illegal.
What makes you assume planned obsolescence is at play here, and not just regular old obsolescence? I suspect the two-decade-old large-format CRTs on display in that shop aren't there due to a lack of replacement parts.
I'm sure that it's _part_ of the problem, no? What percentage of those tons of electronic waste do you think includes smartphones from the last 15 years? Do you think all of it is reused and recycled before it reaches these dump sites?
EDIT: Somewhere around 5 billion phones in 2022 alone[1].
It sure sounds right to me too, but I'm looking at the photos and I don't see any phones. Actually, I don't see much I'd consider using, even if it were still working.
That's a problem too, but it's different from what you're describing.
idk, that looked like an awful lot of ewaste and 0 car tires. Probably just need to borrow the deposit system that car tires use where you pay a large fee (not the 5 cents that plastic bottles use) when buying tires unless you return an equivalent amount.
There's wayyyyy fewer than there used to be. Now they get carved into coal-like pieces and burned for the most part. More heat value per pound than coal.
> In the United States in 2017, about 43% of scrap tires (1,736,340 tons or 106 million tires) were burnt as tire-derived fuel. Cement manufacturing was the largest user of TDF, at 46%, pulp and paper manufacturing used 29% and electric utilities used 25%. Another 25% of scrap tires were used to make ground rubber, 17% were disposed of in landfills and 16% had other uses
It's usually collecting them all in one place that's the hard part nowadays (and if you've managed to create a tire dump, you've done the hard work)
You have looked at a problem and proposed a bunch of completely irrelevant solutions.
What happens when something is repaired? Components are replaced and discarded. What happens eventually when the device wears out? It is is discarded.
If we did everything you listed, it wouldn't even appreciably change the volume of material discarded, since eventually all manufactured items wear out.
And of course, what is missing in this little diatribe? Any solution to the question of what to do with discarded electronics. You aren't solving the core problem.
So what’s the core problem, and what’s your proposal to solve it?
Your logic seems questionable. The article mentions discarded components being recovered for their materials, e.g., copper & plastic. And when something is repaired, by definition some of the components are reused and not discarded. If it takes twice as long to wear out completely, then the replacement purchase rate drops to 50%. Why do you claim that’s not even partially addressing the core problem?
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Instead, please make your substantive points without swipes. For example, if you had posted just the second and third paragraphs of your comment here, it would have been fine.
Look, I'm not saying that this would solve all of these problems. I don't even claim to have the expertise to propose potential solutions. But speaking as a consumer, focusing on the source of what causes them might be a good place to start.
But I'm sure that your expertise and infinite wisdom must be able to produce better ideas to fix this, which I'm eager to hear.
It is not pedantic or contrarian, though. The points they are making are real issues.
The right to repair is important, but from an environmental point of view it is not that relevant. Besides, what the current demographic and economic trajectory of the world, huge populations are accessing the middle classes, with the associated increase in consumption. Even with perfect repairability (which does not solve the issue of discarded parts or plain broken devices, the amount of which is proportional to the number of devices in use), things physically cannot get better. The best lever we have right now is to reduce consumption. It’s about as credible as perfect repairability, but is much more effective. “Do we really need these 6 phones, 3 computers, 2 cars, and microprocessors in every light bulb” is a more pressing question than “can I fix my phone with a torx screwdriver”?
Repairability is a good thing, but it is only part of the battle, and not the most critical.
> The quote was "completely irrelevant". How is that not contrarianism?
That was a slight hyperbole. It is not “completely irrelevant”, merely irrelevant. Contrarianism implies bad faith and knee-jerk reactions. They provided arguments, which you are free to debate or question.
> Ah, consumerism. And what magical lever do we have to reduce that?
Well, realistically? None. Not before it gets significantly worse anyway. It’s still more realistic than getting out of this hole by repairing stuff. The orders of magnitude are just not there.
Again, repairing devices is a good thing. But it’s not a panacea and won’t solve that specific problem.
Ghana long been the example held up by reporting and exhibitions of the global e-waste problem (alongside Tanzania, and China). But one thing I've noticed in recent years' reports is a further twist: as countries' policies have started to shift (and their modernization/attitudes have grown perhaps), like in China for example, they are increasingly re-exporting the incoming e-waste further abroad to other Southeast Asian and African countries. The continued global migration of e-waste as it were. :/
User swappable batteries will extend the life of mobile devices big time. I am old enough to remember that you could easily pop any phone's back cover and swap the battery.
I've replaced batteries in a handful of newer smartphones. It's certainly more of a pain in the rear than on devices who's batteries were meant to be swappable, but it's still do-able. iFixit has parts, guides, and difficulty ratings for a lot of devices.
https://www.sustaphones.com/ has a list of Android devices with up-to-date community ROMs and iFixit battery replacement guides.
> "There’s a whole generation of young people that are building their society from e-waste work."
This is hard, dangerous, indecent work by any first world standard, but it's still work, it's still opportunity, and it's still an industry for people who otherwise might not have one. I don't wish to see this kind of pollution and suffering exist, but I also don't wish to take away something that despite its awfulness is still someone's livelihood. Ladders need bottom rungs. When they closed sweatshops in Bangladesh, the children had to resort to prostitution.
And yet coal wealth was tremendously beneficial for those communities. Kids-in-mines was ended by better labor regulation, not by cutting off the source of the wealth. Ghana has an amazing opportunity here. The world is literally shipping gold to their doorstep. There has got to be a solution that improves standards without cutting them out of the loop.
Any law that improves standards will increase cost and then they don't get the scrap anymore, someone else without laws will. The market will find a place.
I think one of the exciting byproducts of future long term space travel is how it will change people's expectations of the material world. Currently humans generate a significant amount of material which does not have a downstream constituency, and thus is stored, sometimes in less aesthetically acceptable ways like the pictured scrapyard.
Since the topic of TFA is e-waste, many comments here promote "right to repair" legislation as a panacea. I don't think that "right to repair" addresses the root issue in a broad enough way to make a dent. It only addresses a subset of material, operates at hobby scale, and may mandate certain things, like socketed components, that make full-scale automated recycling more difficult.
Yet, we made and buy crappy devices like Niimbot printers, that are not working without proprietary app that collect your data and asks for paying for using different, then default font. What a wonderful e-waste.
"Emmanuel Akatire traveled about 500 miles from his home in Zorko, Ghana, to Accra, the nation’s capital, to find the only work he could — sifting through vast piles of discarded electronics to find valuable scrap metal. A week’s worth of painstaking, often dangerous work, earns him the equivalent of about 60 U.S. dollars."
I just finished The Grapes Of Wrath and this opening sentence feels like an odd futuristic parallel to that story.
Ewaste makes me super sad. I was in an electronics stores recently and found myself bored and even a little bit disgusted - new macbooks! new ipads! new laptops! new phones! Every year, new new new. But I have a lot more fun in the used electronics shop in my city (Guanghua digital plaza in Taipei). I find it a lot more fun to find good deals on parts punching above their weight for the price, e.g. if I find a used computer with a great processor in it that's selling for cheap because the specs are otherwise bad or whatever. And, in general, I find the thrill of the project much more fun than new new new. Can't wait to install linux on this used laptop, oooh a used pixel phone, the camera is still pretty good, maybe I can use this for a pet camera for my lizard, etc.
New phones especially I just don't understand anymore. My phone's been able to do everything I need it to do since like, 2016. New AI "feature," better processors, bigger screens, I don't get it. I have an excellent camera (fuji xt5) so better cameras don't excite me.
I like to buy (some) used hardware when I have need to.
Either the ones that people sent back because they thought that it would be simple and was not (my Cisco home switch), or older tech that is completely fine for my needs.
My personal experience is that when electronics work for two weeks, they will work "forever" - I like someone else doing the test :)
Of course it depends on the hardware. It will be different for a switch and a UPS, or an SSD, ...
> International laws prohibit trafficking of non-functional e-waste containing toxic substances
I wonder if that makes the problem worse by making it hard to ship e-waste to places where it can be more efficiently recycled, so instead it ends up in places where corruption lets it in but there are no recycling facilities beyond "pickers?"
The article mentions repairing some of the electronics. There's even a photo with something that looks like a repair shop. I would buy vintage electronics and PC parts, but these guys are not selling on ebay. So, where do they sell them after they fix them?
Maybe this is just a massive stereotype and a blind spot that I have, but it feels like the business they showed in the article is not equipped for international sales.
I've wondered if it would be better for electronics to be just thrown out in regular trash. I know they have some hazardous materials in them, but when spread out in low levels across landfills maybe its better than concentrating them in places like this...
The only thing that can help this is an enormous export tarriff on eWaste unless it is shipped to a foreign processing centre run by a company that complies with the exporter's labour laws.
I know a large retailer that sells electric screw drivers for €19 a piece. I also know from the chinese manufacturer's backwaters that it's deliberately designed to last for 12 minutes. That's roughly two years in the hand of an average non-professional, who will probably go back and buy another since it was so cheap.
These tools don't have a second-hand market. The expensive built-to-last ones do.
I don't know, I recently saw electric drills for €29 at Aldi and to my surprise they used brushless motors! They will probably last an eternity for hobbyist (minus the batteries).
First you need to spend an absolute fortune on sysadmins to hack together functioning machines from heaps of mostly-broken parts. Then you need to deal with an admin nightmare as every machine will be different, so you need to manage them as individual machines rather than hundreds of identical clones who all behave exactly the same. Then you need to deal with tons of random hardware failures, none of which can be easily solved by hotswapping a standard fan or harddrive you've got lying on the shelf already. And to finish it off, you're also using 5x - 10x more power for the same compute.
Whatever money you're saving on hardware purchase, you're spending many times more on all the other stuff. Free junk electronics are just too expensive.
This cannot be true forever. Transistors are still shrinking yet we're fast approaching physical limits. Hence the ever larger and hotter and more power hungry GPUs and CPUs.
There's also the waste involved in continuously producing those more efficient models. Their lifetime emissions, including manufacturing, may actually be worse compared to certain older generations.
It is indeed heartbreaking. But I don't see moral outrage solving the issue any time soon. People will rather forget about this reality than stop the consumption.
If anyone wants to actually work towards solving the issue they should probably go there and try to invest in ways to clean up the practice. Better tools, better profitability. Education. Etc.
> go there and try to invest in ways to clean up the practice.
You think the problem that needs to be solved is “there”? This sentence makes me question whose consumption you’re referring to in the previous sentence.
It is literally only there. This problem exists because the governments of these places allow it to happen. The reason it doesn't happen here is because we have strong environmental regulations here.
Solve the problem at whatever junction that is exposed for a solution is my point. Being outraged about stuff seems to not magically solve problems. Rather it often has a similar effect as ruminating about problems when being depressed. It often enforces the idea that the problem is somehow unsolvable.
Not saying outrage doesn't have a place. Just that other means might be more efficient.
A bit of a controversial take, but I think the reason that this won’t get solved is the AGW movement. Rather than addressing things like pollution, waste, strip mining, environmental toxicity, and so on the green movement was hijacked to care about a single aspect of environmentalism because rich people could get even richer trading carbon futures.
> movement [X] was hijacked to care about a single aspect of [Y]
I think this is a symptom of a larger issue that has nothing to do with environmentalism. Global cultural consciousness is getting more centralized. There isn't as much room on any particular agenda for multiple facets of any one issue when everything is being bottle necked through a much more centralized cultural sphere.
Yeah… In 2019, the world wasted more than 59.1 million tons of electronics. That's the equivalent of around 350 large cruise ships that are completely filled with e-waste. Most of it used to be due to slow and/or bloated software, but more of it is now batteries. There’s also a bit of just poor manufacturing/design where a device was never good, and therefore as soon as its owner could get better he/she did get better.
Edit: and let’s not forget the deprecation of older standards like 2G and 3G cell networks, or the rise of USB-C.
Regarding batteries specifically, it should be illegal to produce any device without user-replaceable batteries. The EU is at the forefront of these initiatives[1], as usual, so hopefully this trickles out to other governments.
Batteries in EVs are also a growing problem, for both production and disposal. Hopefully we'll have similar regulations there as well.
Used batteries themselves are not that much of a problem, because most of their value is in raw minerals used to make them. Recycling them is basically the same as processing raw metal ore, except the concentration of valuable stuff is much higher than in any natural deposit.
I think the goal here is to allow you to easily fix a device that only has a worn out battery, keeping it out of a landfill. The batteries could still be recycled and the process might be even easier if they were all user replaceable.
This is just one of many ways us in the "first world" exploit the poverty of poorer nations. Wait until you all see what the labor conditions we solicit from these nations look like and all the countries we sell our literal garbage/waste to... knowing full well it will just be dumped in the ocean... but hey, "we didnt do it" y'know? they did. which in reality is just a shallow abdication of responsibility and everyone covering their eyes and ears and pretending like it doesn't exist
A lot of the items on the pictures look like 15+ years old equipment. People don't use CRT TVs or cassette decks, but not because they broke down on schedule. Not saying that planned obsolescence is not an issue, but even if a piece of equipment serves you for decades, you still need a good plan on how it could be disposed of properly.
It's a pretty common pattern in capitalist democracies that powerful business interests attempt (often successfully) shunt responsibility away from themselves onto consumers, who just so happen to be in one of the weakest position to actually affect a change.
It works because (in America at least) individualism is such a powerful force that all kinds of social problems can get re-contextualized into questions of individual morality, and people won't bat an eye.
Also, from a PR standpoint, if someone does not want to solve a problem, it looks a lot better to acknowledge the problem but insist on an unworkable solution (e.g. all consumers must coordinate to change their preferences, so the manufactures never have to bother themselves with anything beyond market forces) than to straight-up insist the problem remain.
Is the manufacturer really the best default handler for waste? Companies are incredibly mortal and the 'big corporation that is guaranteed to outlive you and can be counted on for things like pensions' days are gone. Trying to get the CRT factories to take back the old sets just doesn't work when they have been out of business for decades.
This is starting to sound like the place for a government to ensure that the disposal is some sort of tax stamp/deposit and carried out by some entity, whether direct government, manufacturer while they are still around to reclaim their deposit, or paid recycling contractors.
> Is the manufacturer really the best default handler for waste?
It's a better one than putting all the onus on the end user. If it's made their responsibility, they can do things no one else can, like making design changes to enhance recyclability.
> This is starting to sound like the place for a government to ensure that the disposal is some sort of tax stamp/deposit and carried out by some entity...
I agree. I think government action would be required for force the manufacturers take responsibility, because market forces aren't up to the job.
The thing I really object to is the idea all or even most of the onus in on consumers to individually deal with this remote and society-wide problems.
I'd like to see an arial photo of this site, because these images paint an awful picture without actually showing us how big this dump is. 15,000 tons/annum in one area shouldn't be all that much in the grand scheme of things but the photos manage to make it look like this is some sort of boundless hellscape.
I'd hazard the actual problem in this picture is Ghana's GDP/capita being in 4 digit territory and not the badly disposed of waste dump.
> I'd hazard the actual problem in this picture is Ghana's GDP/capita being in 4 digit territory and not the badly disposed of waste dump.
But if Ghana became a wealthy country and chose not to accept this waste, it will end up in the next one.
The waste exists regardless, and the economic incentive for the original market "export" it, that is, hide the problem, and the receiving country to reluctantly accept it for some other consideration, whether it be money or state aid or tariff-free export of something else, will always exist while the waste does.
Re: "badly disposed of waste dump", the difference between this and landfill anywhere in the west is largely just the soil on top. Staggering amounts of recyclable and dangerous stuff still gets thrown away in inappropriate ways right near where you live, I imagine. And if the global North exports waste to the global South, sooner or later the scale almost inevitably overwhelms the receiver.
There are a finite number of poor countries. At the rate wealth is being generated it is conceivable that they all get wealthy enough that the waste gets handled well.
And this stuff all started out in heavy metals deposits, it is already present underground somewhere. The only real question is how serious the effects on humans are with any method of disposal. It isn't at all clear there is a problem as long as it is buried fairly deep and not leeching into the water table.
>> There are a finite number of poor countries. At the rate wealth is being generated it is conceivable that they all get wealthy enough that the waste gets handled well.
This waste was dumped. The fact that poor people moved to the dump to make a living scavenging is a secondary phenomenon. Without them it still would have been dumped.
Yeah but it being dumped, in the abstract, doesn't matter. It is like complaining that there is a desert or an ocean - there are places on the earth that aren't good to live in. An electronics dump somewhere doesn't rate compared to something like the Pacific Ocean in terms of how much landmass gets sterilised.
This is a bit of an imaginary solution to the problem, is it not? And there will always be poor_er_ countries, which is the thrust of my point.
The economic incentive does not go away. Not least because it is clearly already cheaper to float it away on a huge boat than bury it where it is used.
One problem is land cost: it's extremely difficult to safely build new houses on top of landfill. But that doesn't explain everything, does it? After all the USA has plenty of room to bury all its consumer waste. Why is it exporting it?
> And this stuff all started out in heavy metals deposits, it is already present underground somewhere.
It does not start out all in one place, though. It starts out in small, dispersed concentrations of heavy metals, and ends up all in a few giant landfills in poorer countries. It's not clear what the risk is, but the lack of clarity doesn't mean there's no risk.
> This is a bit of an imaginary solution to the problem, is it not? And there will always be poor_er_ countries, which is the thrust of my point.
I don't mind if the waste comes to my country. Australia is big and we're wealthy enough that it'll be handled safely. If we were the poorest country on the globe then it'd be a non-issue.
Pictures are always taken from a very low angle and make it look much larger than it is. Behind the electronics area there is the riverbed. When you look at the picture, you might think the „dump site“ goes on and on. It doesn’t.
Trust me, I visited the place in 2014. Of course I had read about the place before. When I got out of the car, first impression was that our driver didn’t bring us to the right spot. It is not that big actually. The waste was mostly domestic then, judging from what I saw (CRTs for example).
Agbogbloshie is so much more than the processing of e-waste. Think of it as a commercial area. There was a large market for onions and other products. There were workshops where people build gas stoves out of car rims. Dismantling cars was big business. There was a Coca Cola Factory on the other side of the road. The air quality was really bad but it was mainly caused by burning tires, not cables. You cannot have tires sitting around there because they will always catch water (in any orientation) and therefore be a breeding bed for anopheles, which is the vector for malaria as you may be aware of.
Over all, the people who worked with electronics, not only the scrapers but also the people who actually repair and sell things, where only a fraction of the people living, working and trading goods there.
It might look different today. Government cleaned the riverbed at least once in order to prevent floorings. There were also attempts to move the onion market. Don’t know if that really happened. I am not saying everything was fine there. Working with e-waste is dangerous. There are unhealthy levels of lead and other things in the soil and in the people. But there was neither the infrastructure nor the workers to process significant loads of foreign e-waste. Even 15,000 tons per year (figures thrown around then in western media where an order of magnitude higher) is two heavy trucks per day.
I will post a few other sources later but have to sleep now. But check this out:
It doesn't matter how big the dump is, it shouldn't exist from first principles.
Think about how incredibly worked out these devices are, how many brilliant people worked to design them, to figure out how to source the materials, how to combine them, etc... Miracles of engineering they are. Everything planned out carefully.
And then you throw them away.
That's the idea. It's not an accident. The lifecycle of these machines was designed.
It's fucking insane. The best you can say about it is that it's not quite as insane as animal sacrifice.
Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed... which is what probably scares the corporate oligarchy. If we're not buying new phones every couple of years how will the stock prices keep going up?
Never the less, the devices we make these days can last a long, long time. I've been repairing and maintaining iPhone 5's, 7's, and 8's that are no where near their end of life. The iPhone has a couple of small electrolytic capacitors which should have a useful life of at least 20 years. And can be replaced! The batteries and screens can replaced. These devices can last much longer than we give them credit for.
But tech companies have been struggling to make it illegal or difficult to repair for a long time. I've been seeing photojournalist projects such as this since the late 90s at least (longer perhaps). In North America we had a culture that valued repairing and building things that lasted. It's as good a time as any to push for this to return! Support policy makers that are pushing for right-to-repair and environmental protection!
And pick up a new hobby if you are able. Support your local tech geeks if you can!
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