E-waste is growing 5x faster than it's recycled, says UN
Right to Repair should be the Obligation to Repair, if we want to avoid drowning in trashed electronics
In the 2010s, my neighbor asked me to fix their iPad because i was technically literate. I noticed it had a EoL date and it was fast approaching. I realized that iPads were just bigger iPhones. And Chromebooks were also getting popular.
I then realized we were all fucked.
We have all this "disposable" tech that only have a window of about 3-4 years before it breaks down. Even with open-source and boot loading, there's just so much garbage and it'll only continue to grow.
We should also force all these tech companies to take in any e-waste (batteries, cables, usb drives, hard drives, plastic containers, anything) and dispose of it properly.
dispose of it properly
Ship it to the Philippines and the container mysteriously vanishes mid transit?
and dispose of it properly
Introducing i-Landfill™!
Think different!®
.. shove it up their CEO's ass?
Tech is becoming more difficult to repair as well. Had a phone that somehow got its WiFi broken. Did everything I could do software wise, so I concluded it was something with the hardware.
Asked a repair shop what they could do. Well they could replace the entire board with CPU and everything, but that’s going to cost about the same as buying a new phone. The choice was easy.
Tech is becoming more difficult to repair as well
There's a bit of sanity in the world: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protection-law/consumer-contract-law/rules-promoting-repair-goods_en
Framework is a great company, but I'm a bit torn on Fairphone. Not sure if I like where their company is going.
EDIT: Because some people asked for clarification about Fairphone, here are my (very subjective) thoughts:
I think the idea behind Fairphone is great, and I think more phone manufacturers should take a few hints about repairability and sustainability from them.
That said, their software is just okay, missing a lot of QoL features that are found with other manufacturers. Also, I've seen reports of pretty gnarly bugs after OS updates, but I can't verify those personally.
Their customer service sucks, according to a lot of people. And as someone with experience in both industries (mostly customer support) I can tell you that those things usually speak for a lackluster management.
Also, small nitpick: I really wish they'd kept a headphone jack on their newest phone.
So yeah, as I said, mostly very subjective. But hey, no one said that liking or not liking something can only be for objective reasons.
I've been toying with an idea that the government should keep track of purchases (voluntarily and anonymously) and they should have minimum guaranteed. So if your freezer only last 10 years then the government can see this, or you can see this on the website and the manufacturer has to repair it or refund it fully. Different products have different guarantees
That would sort out shit products pretty quick.
The issue is holding that capital for insurance, especially for new companies (like seriously this is a potential dealbreaker problem) but it might have the added benefit that shite from China can't get insurance and can't be sold, only local products can, or products from the west.
Secondly the price of recycling should be included in the upfront cost and the government should provide free recycling. Or it is 150% of recycling cost and the consumer gets the 50% back when they recycle rather than throwing it in a river.
I’ve been toying with an idea that the government should keep track of purchases (voluntarily and anonymously) and they should have minimum guaranteed.
There is already stuff like that where I live in the EU, it runs basically on (e-)receipts or other proofs of sale. Don't mandatory warranties exist in the US?
that shite from China can’t get insurance
Oh, it totally will, and they will even pretend everything is alright when sold, then by the time you try getting at them the company won't exist.
Bullshit. I have an iPad from 2011 still in use, Macbook from 2012 still fine running Debian, etc.
I understand that if you're tech incompetent you need to throw shit out after 2 years, but don't blame the rest of us for the amount of trash you produce.
Edit: Funny how people downvote someone else for their own dumb actions. You're all consumers, and bad ones at it apparently.
True to a degree but you can do similar things with thinkpads and keep them longer. The company can always extend lifetime by enabling repairability and upgradeability. But this goes against their profit since they then can’t sell a new product every two years. The consumer shouldn’t have to find ways around planned obsolescence and feel superior if they manage to solve this puzzle.
You gave an example where it is possible to install linux and only basic functionality is required, but what do you think happens with almost all mobile devices?
When it is not possible to change OS/ROM, or they are old, there is no alternative... apart from being stuck with an obsolete OS and apps full of known bugs. Or are you "competent" enough to develop everything yourself?
Pretty much this. If you buy decent stuff and take care of it, then there's now less of an expiration date than ever before in my experience.
Computers 20+ years ago were really old after 5 years, but nowadays you can put an SSD into a PC from 10 years ago and it will be more than good enough for most people's usage. And if it doesn't have enough memory for the current windows 10 bloat, then Linux is an option, but imo it's better to just add extra ram so that the user can just stay with a familiar os.
Likewise tablets and smartphones, buy decent specs, don't use cheap chargers and don't drop them too often and they just seem too last. And if they do slow down, then a factory reset is easy+fast and can bring them to life again. In my family an almost 10y old Shield K1 still works smoothly for daily online media consumption. A cheap Samsung and Microsoft surface from the same era are now giving a horrible experience though, but those 2 were always shit in comparison to the shield.
They should really mandate open firmware and bootloaders, and even spec sheets, etc. for deprecated hardware.
But muh "trade secrets" and "security"
And lawmakers don't even know what a bootloader is.
Just another byproduct of enshittification. Novadays, a top-end Garmin watch lasts about as long as a Chinese watch of a brand with random characters you buy off Amazon. Google is introducing planned obsolesence in Fitbit. Banking apps are beginning to require phones that are no more than 4 years old. TVs get bricked with firmware upgrades. So, consumers are trained to buy cheapest, least reliable electronics, because over time they'll provide more value than top-end items which used to last much longer. (This was written on a 13 years old phone. I may not have access to my banking app anymore, but otherwise it works for everything I need, and I haven't contributed to e-waste in this regard. Not that the pollution angle was my reason to keep the phone, but it's a nice extra bonus.)
I can guarantee this user is not using an iPhone from 2011 - the iPhone 4s went to shit after the first few years of updates
Samsung Galaxy S2. With a replaceable battery and good external cover, that thing can last for a long time. I did contribute to e-waste by replacing the battery three times so far, but that's all.
I can guarantee that any Android phone with a good modding community can last this much. He's probably using Samsung galaxy s series or those old Google Nexus phone.
My phone's official support stopped at Android 10 yet I'm currently running Android 14 with the help of custom rom.
Hello! Not sure if the screenshot will attach to this comment but I was able to successfully log into Lemmy and I'm replying to your comment from my iPhone 4s.
With all of this being said and done, I do agree that OP is not likely to be using an iPhone. An Android phone from this period is way more usable than this iPhone even with all the hacks I've done to it.
what phone do you use?
That is an old phone! Makes me wish my OnePlus One did not break. I miss that phone, I would probably still be using it if it hadn't.
13 years old? What? Even with custom ROMs, how is that still running modern apps?
It's not. 90% of my phone usage is calling, text messages, FM radio, taking quick photos, and checking the weather. The rest is the occasional browsing. I haven't really found the need to do more with my phone.
Google is introducing planned obsolesence in Fitbit
Have they? In what way?
They've done good work for Android and Pixel, promising 7 years of updates for the latest Pixels. Samsung has also gotten much better about this with their recent phones. That's going to put a huge dent in the e-waste as Android phones have surely been heavy contributors (certainly much higher than fitbit).
TVs get bricked with firmware upgrades.
What TVs? Vizio, Hisense, the Chinese junk budget brands?
Very sympathetic to your e-waste concerns; I think the source of the problem is actually getting better not worse though. In general, the mobile tech sector is "growing up" and supporting products longer.
Have they? In what way?
This is speculation by Ars Technica. Essentially, a recent firmware upgrade seems to have drastically lowered the battery life of some models. In addition, they are removing all third-party apps in the EU in response to the DMA.
What TVs? Vizio, Hisense, the Chinese junk budget brands?
Most recently Roku. But I used a TV only as an example. A year ago, an OTA upgrade bricked microwave ovens. Google's history of bricking its smart home products goes back to at least 2016, companies like Wink threaten to brick your devices unless you suddenly start paying a monthly fee on top of your purchase price "for life", there were reports of smart bulbs or thermostats ceasing working as well.
The following is pure speculation on my part: I think we're at the beginning of a huge wave of planned obsolescence. Everyone and their mother are now training AI's, and they want their customers to replace older products, which don't support AI integration, with new ones. They'll soon stop supporting the older devices or outright bricking them, to force people to buy the new ones.
Fitbits that aren't the latest model have battery lives shorter than 12 hours (many users reporting 6 hours or less) after a firmware update. It's a well-reported issue on the fitbit community.
And not to be rude but have you used any electronics released in the past decade? Battery life always goes to crap almost exactly 2 years after purchase, and no one releases products with replaceable batteries. Appliances use plastic parts and come with a plethora of unnecessary features all on one circuit board so when one feature breaks the appliance is dead, with replacement parts being almost as costly as a new appliance. Inkjet printers refuse to work without all the colors being full, even to the point of not scanning when out of ink. There's even a story going around about a business-class HP printer that stopped working (full on ink) because the credit card attached to the ink subscription expired.
It's gone long past planned obsolescence at this point. Whether it's software or hardware, companies want you subscribed for life. Anything less and they break the devices that were able to dupe you into thinking you owned.
Because it’s a PITA to recycle e-waste, at least where I live in the US. My municipality charges extra to drop off e-waste, and they only have a few days a year where they have dropoff at the local transfer center to get rid of e-waste.
Hope you have the day off and the cash to pay to get rid of whatever it is.
I used to live in a county where it was incredibly easy. Just pull into their clean transfer center and they'll take it out of your trunk for you. Not just e-waste, but toxic stuff like paint and motor oil. And it was paid for by a very small tax increase.
But now that I live in a different county I have to drop off my electronics between 9 and 3 on a weekday, and there is no mechanism for me to dispose of toxic household waste.
a very small tax increase
That was likely painted as killing your children and causing hellfire to rain down on your home, if some political ads are to be believed. And that's the actual issue at the heart of everything: if a corporation can't make obscene amounts of profit doing it, it won't get done.
i mean, hell, it's a PITA to recycle in the US in general. Our nearest recycling center is a middle school 20 minutes from where we live.
Once that's gone? Who knows!
About a month ago my neighbor left a nice looking TV out by the trash for bulk item pickup with a note saying, "not sure if this works, but free if you want it." Cosmetically the unit looked to be in good shape, but sure enough when I bring it inside to test, none of the HDMI ports would pick up a signal. I tried different HDMI cables and devices to double check. All of the TV menus would work and there was static on the cable channel, so I knew the pixels themselves were fine. I opened the unit up to find 3 separate circutboards inside, a main board (with the HDMI ports soldered on), a power board, and I think a timing board or something like that (forget the acronym I came across researching). Well I decided to roll the dice and replace the main board with a $130 purchase for a replacement, took about 30 minutes to swap out. Sure enough with a new main board the TV, HDMI units and all, worked perfectly. Now I'm up a 60" Sharp AQUOS TV (~$1500 new) for the price of the replacement board. More importantly, the satisfaction of plugging in an HDMI and seeing a signal come through was priceless. Support right to repair, we have an obligation to preserving and reusing the resources we have access to.
Have you ever had a Logitech mouse start to act funny with the left click? Maybe it double clicks when you know you've single clicked, or you click and drag and it doesn't? Yeah it's probably the microswitch. I've got a little herd of M570's, after a few years they all start doing that, so I pop them open, it's like 4 or 5 screws hidden under the little rubber feet and one in the battery compartment, desolder the switch, solder on a new one, and it's back to working like new.
I've had a guy arguing with me that that's not worth it.
I had a random orbital sander stop working. So many people these days would say "It's a $99 tool, I'll just throw it away and buy a new one." I took mine apart and cleaned the dust out of it. Running like brand new.
Why are people so afraid of fixing things?
Why are people so afraid of fixing things?
There’s a lot of answers to that question.
Device/tool repair is typically not taught in schools, and from my perspective seems far less likely to be taught at home than it was in previous generations.
Most people have substantially less free time than in previous decades. Sure, some things only take 10-30 minutes to repair, but learning how to make the repair is often a significant time investment.
Devices and tools are intentionally designed to be less reparable, if only to cut costs (e.g. using glue instead of screws). Less obvious repairs take more time to learn.
Lastly, a lot of people never learned how to do any of this; they just took their broken stuff down to a VCR repair. Repair shops nearly don’t exist anymore, and the ones that do charge a substantial sum to repair modern devices. It’s often more financially prudent to buy a new laptop than it is to replace the screen of a four-year-old one, for example.
Personally, I think a factor is there's been a shift by companies in general to not make things as obvious to repair. My dad has a unibody 2012 MacBook Pro and the book literally tells you how to open it so you can service it by upgrading the RAM; a far cry from the situation today.
Older tools were held together with some common screws and were all built the same, so there wasn't too much concern from the layman popping one open to clean it out to service it. Modern power tools just don't look like you should be opening them, as the screws are completely hidden, they're hard to open comparatively, and its usually the battery that goes anyway, which can't be replaced when it's been discontinued.
My Logitech G500s had the funny clicker, I have a soldering iron but that felt a bit too fiddly (at the time) but I was able to dismantle the switch itself on the board and bend the contacts a bit. Been three years and it's still behaving. The cable went too at one point, with random disconnects as it moved. Was surprised to discover I could just order a new cable that plugged into the internal socket and it was good as new!
Sometimes it can be an exercise in frustration. My wife's Redmi note 10 is on its 4th screen, the original and third ones were dropped, the second was shit and crapped out after a couple of months, the fourth is showing signs of going the same way. Along with occasional locking up and WiFi problems that are fixed with a reboot (pretty sure I didn't break it on my many delves into its guts) I decided fuck it, its a ~£200 phone, get something else this time.
So instead I'm tearing my hair out trying to get her new Samsung A54 to restore the last Google backup.
Wish I had your neighbors. Mine almost always smash their stuff before dumping in the bin so no one else can use it.
Although a few things have creeped through. My current desktop is a AMD something or other, 4Ghz, 32GB Ram, 500GB ssd and all I had to do was get an IO shield and replace some fans.
Reminds me of the time I found a TV in the trash that said "remote doesn't work." I opened it up and the sensor had somehow been bent out of alignment, so I bent it back and that TV's been in my bedroom ever since.
btw with most modern tvs using side mounted hdmi on the pcb directly, it's bad solder joints causing these issues. Resoldering the connectors fixes it like half the time.
As long as Ghana isn't full, we Westerners can keep consuming waste happily.
I mean, what is the value of a Ghanaian child compared to having to use a phone for 10 years with a third battery replacement?
/s ...you dropped that.
I know we left reddit but https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTheS/
the solution here is simple. we just stop recycling altogether. 5 times 0 is 0.
More like 5 divided by 0 is infinite.
yeahhh i was mostly coping through humor.
English-language logically wise I want the answer to be 5, because there was no division done.
(I get why that doesn't work mathematically.)
More like 5 divided by 0 is infinite.
Positive infinite or negative infinite?
Yet they're still able to put those stupid fucking recycling labels on their products as if it's recycled.
Not sure which one you mean but I have a feeling it's a lot like the resin identification code where it looks like the recycling symbol but isn't. It's to make you think it can be recycled so you don't feel as bad about buying it and throwing it away.
I emailed MSI support to get a new hinge for my F key. They repeatedly told me the entire keyboard needed to be replaced. After several days of back and forth, and me assuring the support person that, no I just need the key hinge, and that yes, they could just send me the hinge and I could fix it myself, they relented.
Took 30 seconds and didn't mean that a perfectly good keyboard be trashed.
Planned obsolescence is indeed a thing. Companies don't want you to stick to your devices forever.
Maybe if everything wasn't designed to be unrepairable and fragile as fuck this wouldn't be an issue.
So the state should build up more recycling capacity, subsidize it.
Properly disposing of any product should be baked into the purchase price. If you wanna buy cheap plastic shit then you should pay for society to get rid of it when you're done with it. But that makes way too much sense so it will never happen.
That's communism and communism is evil. /s
do your part, buy old used shit, it's cheap, good for the environment, and makes you feel good :)
Or just don't buy new things. That's my other strategy.
Chuck Linux on it
second and third this one. Bought a 2011-2012 era thinkpad, stuffed linux on it, configured it. Shits mint. Couldn't ask for more.
This works for clothes, kitchenware etc. but it's not the same for tech products. The vast majority of people just want to buy something new that will work for a couple of years. Even cars are less trouble to buy older models and second-hand. This is obviously not an unfixable problem. If everything was designed to be user-repairable, upgradable and with longer support for both software and hardware we'd have less of an issue. But sadly the world runs on capitalism and people have voted with their wallets and gotten us into this mess.
Most people don't have the time, energy and/or knowledge to make the better choice of getting old and used tech.
idk, i disagree. I do quite a bit of stuff on my workstation, including some video editing. And the only real upgrade i would make to it right now is going to 30 series nvidia, or the AMD equivalent, because linux. And ryzen 5000, because it's just such a good die process.
Neither of those are new. You could easily buy used hardware in both of those brackets. My current workstation is running a 1070 and an r5 2600. Ancient hardware by todays standards, but perfectly serviceable. Maybe in a laptop? But even then, i have 12 year old laptops, they run fine. They do what i need them to do. And they look great.
You have any specific examples? Phones maybe, they have such a short life cycle it's not hard to find 2-3 year old flagship selling at a reduced cost these days. I genuinely can't think of any examples where this wouldn't happen.
Let's look at the bright side. Since an appalling percentage of the stuff will either be working, or broken but salvageable, the scavengers might turn it into something useful after the collapse.
My sector. Go ahead and pay me more if you want more.
"Come on guys, solar panels don't make that much waste. Besides, it's renewable!"
"Nuclear Fission is dangerous, we shouldn't make more power plants, invest in things like solar!"
Don't mind me, just waving my tiny "I was right" flag as we drown in our own hubris.
How are we even supposed to know what's right anymore? Am I supposed to vote for the solar or the nuclear fanatics? I just wanna save the fucking climate, what should I do?
Edit: I'm sorry if this isn't phrased clearly, but what I mean to say is "solar fanatics or nuclear fanatics", implying that I feel right in the middle between the to and just want to make the right choice. People are arguing loudly from both sides.
Well, the 'nuclear fanatics' are probably the best bet for actually saving the climate. The energy to waste ratio makes renewable energy look like a squirt gun compared to a fire hose. Even including the nuclear disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima, renewable energy is more dangerous to human life.
If you care to learn in video format, Kyle Hill has done an invaluable service illustrating very important things about nuclear energy.
Nuclear. Go ahead and call me a fantic or whatever you want, I am sure I have been called worse. Renewables in anything resembling a near timeline aren't up fro the task and we should have started decades ago.
It is one of the depressing things about tech. We often know the exact solution and convince ourselves that it won't work.
Always vote for the futuristic sci Fi energy sources
Issue is that it is the most accessible form of hone electric generation