An e-waste dumping ground | Hacker News

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

¹ At best it only measures those who rate and it can be gamed (true for every media).

² For the bad incentives you mention.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

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.

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.

In the modern world, with no animals and insects, but full of invasive species, you will find this endevour quiet difficult.

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 …

Just a thought.

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.

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.

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.

RISC-V can’t catch up soon enough.

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.

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.

And it plays videogames. Sounds like a win-win to me.

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

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

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.

(0) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/andy-farnell-perils-of…

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.

(0) https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230904-how-the-royal-mi…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”

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.

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.

They manage in neighboring Switzerland though.. Less greed and more pride for a job well done maybe?

The people who do the actual dumping tend to be poor, not the world running rich.

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:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/recycling/recycle-guidelines/pc…

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.

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.

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.

If we use the numbers from the article (250k tons) and from the site your provided (62 million tons), “extensive quantities” is 0.4% of e-waste.

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.

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.

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.

At the time I was having to put in a lot of long shifts. It helped until it didn’t. Patches work great, strongly recommended.

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.

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.

It’s still incredibly easy.

If you could magically make every person in the United States look at these photos for 30 minutes, nothing would change about how we live and consume.

All that matters is that my streets are pristine.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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…

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.

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.

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 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

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.

What’s the parent commenter supposed to do? Live without a stovetop because the old one can’t be fixed?

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 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.

That’s a problem too, but it’s different from what you’re describing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire-derived_fuel

> 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)

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.

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?

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.

The quote was “completely irrelevant”. How is that not contrarianism?

> The best lever we have right now is to reduce consumption.

Ah, consumerism. And what magical lever do we have to reduce that?

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.

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.

Not only it would reduce e-waste, but it would also disincentivize the lowest-margin, sweat shop production.

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, …

These tools don’t have a second-hand market. The expensive built-to-last ones do.

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.

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.

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?”

Edit: and let’s not forget the deprecation of older standards like 2G and 3G cell networks, or the rise of USB-C.

It’s also 118 pounds for every person on earth. That seems really high for e-waste.

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.

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.

Not saying outrage doesn’t have a place. Just that other means might be more efficient.

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.

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.

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.

Not really. The other end is the manufacturers.

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.

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.

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 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.

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:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01973…

One of the authors is a geographer at the University of Ghana. Full paper should be available via your local library or sci-hub.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.