Today's Lighter TVs Mean Much Less E-Waste

MojoKid writes "We all know that today's flat-screen TVs weigh far less than old-style CRTs, or they wouldn't be able to hang on the wall. New research from the Consumer Electronics Association finds that this translates into a massive savings of electronics waste. The report found that today's flat screen TVs are 82% lighter and 75% smaller than cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs. In other words, 40- to 70-inch flat-panel TVs weigh 34% less than 13- to 36-inch CRT TVs. This reduction in materials has a staggering downstream effect. The report claimed that an old 36-inch CRT TV generated about the same amount of electronics waste as 5,080 cell phones. However, today's 70-inch flat-screen TV generate the equivalent of just 953 cell phones."

Comments

Tit for tat

[MrQuacker]

Sure, you eliminate several kilos of leaded glass, but you replace it with LCD electronics and all the highly toxic compounds associated with that process. Crushed and submerged in water, leaded glass will not leech, but let the waste from LCDs soak in a stream and you'll soon find heavy metals downstream.

So while you have less overall weight of e-waste, the potency of the waste goes up.

Re:Tit for tat

[Moridineas]

I bought a Samsung LNT4069 tv about 3-4 years ago. Within 2 years of buying it, it completely died...wouldn't turn on. Luckily the problem was busted caps and after a trip to *3* different radio shacks (er, "The Shacks") to find the proper capacitors I was easily able to replace them and the TV is still working perfectly today.

Most people would not be able to fix that kind of problem. Most people would not take their tv to a repair shop anymore (doesn't make sense most of the time). Most people who have ANY kid of electronics failure are just going to ditch the device. Doesn't matter that the technology should inherently be longer lasting, one shoddy cap is all it takes. Shoddy caps are no rarity today!!

Re:Tit for tat

[plover]

There are a lot more attributes than longevity and maintainability.

There's quality. You're comparing the 525 interlaced lines of SDTV with the 1080 progressive scan lines of an HDTV. You can claim "it's just a TV, it worked fine for all those years", but in reality, the image was substantially worse than HDTV. And with a 16:9 aspect ratio, you see the original movie without the funky pan-and-scan reediting needed to shift perspective to the most important on-screen action.

Price is important: your $400 25" TV set from 1970 cost the equivalent of $2,300 in 2011 dollars. You can get a 26" LCD today for about $200. Even if you replaced one every two years, the LCD is still cheaper.

For efficiency, the tubes powering your hundred pound 25" CRT TV probably drew 300-400 watts while on. Many TVs of the 1970s had "instant on", meaning the filaments of the tubes were kept hot while the TV was "off", drawing perhaps sixty watts of standby current. That feature also led to premature burnout of filaments, requiring more frequent tube replacement. Today's 26" LCD weighs less than 20 pounds, and draws 26 watts while on.

As far as availability goes, well, in 1970 your choice was CRT or nothing. CRTs obviously win in that comparison.

Safety wise, of that hundred pounds of 25" TV set, about 40 pounds of it was lead. The circuit boards were soldered with lead. The entire inside of the back half of the tube, everything but the front screen, was either lined with lead or made with leaded glass in order to catch the electrons after they had excited the phosphors on the front. The phosphors themselves were often made with cadmium. The picture tubes leaked small amounts of X-Ray radiation to its viewers. And when damaged, the picture tubes could implode, causing a glass shrapnel hazard, not to mention the huge static charge the flyback transformers generated inside the tubes.

Environmentally, it wasn't until this century that the EPA required they be kept from landfills, meaning the older landfills and junkyards (built before modern containment landfills were invented) will remain filled with every TV disposed of from the 1940s through the 1990s. Once broken, the lead-lined CRTs will readily leach lead into the environment. The leaded glass may leach much more slowly, but it still does leach over time. Older LCD TVs have cold cathode fluorescent tubes containing a bit of mercury vapor, while newer ones are using LEDs for illumination. A RoHS compliant LCD TV is not going to risk damaging the environment nearly as much as a CRT.

Even if it seems like they were "built to last", they delivered a much lower-quality product wrapped in a dangerous and highly toxic shell, at ten times the price.

Longevity may be a desirable attribute, but it's certainly not the only important attribute.

Re:Tit for tat

[adolf]

CCFL backlight tubes (like your set has) are replaceable. It's not generally a very fun process as it takes some time to do, but it is do-able.

We've replaced a few in the shop, mostly on laptops, but the concept is exactly the same as size scales up.

The most common failure I see on LCDs these days, is electrolytic capacitors. I fixed dodgy a 19" Viewsonic LCD a month or so ago at home by replacing a visibly swollen cap with a $2 Nichicon from Radio Shack. (Yep, I got ripped off on the part, but it's so cheap that it really doesn't matter, was cash-and-carry, and the new part is better enough than the old one that it's unlikely to fail that way again.)

The hardest part, in both cases, is just the basic disassembly and reassembly. And these things are generally far easier to take apart than, say, an iPod...

Whether it's worth it or not to fix (or have fixed) your LCD when it fails is up to you. But back to the topic of TFA: If/when you decide that it's had enough, do the landfill a favor and at least try to give it away on Craigslist or something first.

I mean: If it dies tomorrow, I (for one) would love to try to rescue it for a bedroom TV, or a wall-mounted PC display, or something cheap to occasionally hang up by the pool. And even though I suck at component-level troubleshooting, I'd have a crack at fixing it.

Re:Tit for tat

[plover]

Product lockdown is a very specialized argument that sort-of applies to a very few specific pieces of old gear, such as phones that trade some functions in exchange for funneling all your money through Apple. But it has little to do with television sets or other products.

If you're going to work so hard to find a specific example where longevity is somehow "good" because it trades some fairly insignificant features for some other fairly insignificant features; you should know it's a lot easier to find many, many counter examples where product longevity seriously increases your risk of injury or death.

Any car built in the 1970s is far less safe than its modern counterparts, thanks to safety improvements made over time. If you are still driving a 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass (on the off chance it didn't rust through by 1980), a head-on collision is much more likely to ram a steering wheel column through your chest than a modern car. Or it's going to crush you inside the passenger compartment, instead of absorbing the energy in computer-designed crumple zones. Or it's going to smash you hard against the dashboard, instead of against a collapsing airbag cushion triggered by a computer chip. Even if that car had amazing longevity of the mechanical components, its safety over time never improved. Cars built in the 80s and 90s were much improved, as their crash survivability was improved. Cars built in the previous decade were better, because they had safety features that helped maintain control in an accident. Cars built in the current decade are even better still, with active systems to help the driver avoid the accidents in the first place.

If you bought a prescription for Vioxx in 2002, do you think it would be a good thing to have stocked up on a lifetime supply of pills? What about buying a drum of long-lasting DDT? Or painting your rooms with gallons of lead paint, because it's so much more durable than latex? Insulating your house with asbestos, the miracle fiber that didn't degrade or rot? At what point did your durable 1970s TV stop emitting X-Ray radiation at its viewers? Does your 1970s vacuum cleaner with its cloth bag filter out harmful particulates, or just recirculate them into your lungs?

Any building erected a decade after another building has had its safety improved by improvements to codes and in building materials and construction practices. The newer the building, the more its occupants are protected against fires, flood, mold, radon, toxins, and/or collapse.

All those old products were shown to cause much more physical harm than their modern counterparts. Longevity simply means you are exposed to more risks over their lifetimes instead of replacing them with safer alternatives.

Closer to your contrived cell phone example, a cell phone from 1991 emitted 600mW of RF energy right next to your skull. Depending on what studies you read, there may or may not be a correlation to cell phone usage and brain cancer. Modern phones are more limited in the amount of energy they're permitted to radiate. The ability to use earbuds and headphones to move the radiation even further away from your brain is now a common option that was not even present on your 1997 Nokia, yet you are claiming that phones like it are somehow better than an iPhone because they're older and lasted longer.

The bottom line is still very simple: longevity does not automatically make a product better. Longevity is not the only attribute you should consider if you're trying to determine quality.

In the Business

[retroworks]

(Cracks knuckles).... First, the CRTs themselves last a long time (and apparently survive heat waves better). More recently, many of the CRT TV are assembled with cheaper tuner boards and speakers, etc., are not "solid state". The failure to last longer was not the cathode ray tube's fault, and most CRTs exported are rebuilt with a new board (see article on exports of used CRT tubes http://tinyurl.com/5wz37u2). So while the Cathode Ray Tubes themselves last much longer than the LCDs fluorescent lamps (don't know about LED), as the CRT market went downscale, quality suffered, and e-waste may increase if we are not allowed to re-export them to have those tunerboards replaced (the same factories which assembled them buy them back, but that's increasingly illegal because Americans assume the factories are paying $10 apiece and then burning them).

What is incredible at our Vermont "e-waste" recycling plant are the number of flat TVs coming in with a small impact crack in the corner. They are called "Wii Screens" by the staff. Apparently, people "bowling" and doing other arcade stuff on the games tend to forget to attach the wrist strap. So the E-Waste jury is still out - the CRT TVs are heavier, but if they have solid state boards will last longer, and they deflect flying plastic "ewaste" satellite gadgets.

So regarding TFA, the moral is that the "ewaste" volume is not going down, but the "ewaste" export we were worried about was not as bad as we thought it was in the first place.

Finally, if the CEA and industry was really concerned, they'd make the LCDs so you could replace the LCD and the fluorescent lamps. The LCD screens appear to us to be designed to make that virtually impossible.