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Almost 45 Million Tons of E-waste Discarded Last Year (apnews.com)
A new study claims 44.7 million metric tons (49.3 million tons) of TV sets, refrigerators, cellphones and other electrical good were discarded last year, with only a fifth recycled to recover the valuable raw materials inside. From a report: The U.N.-backed study published Wednesday calculates that the amount of e-waste thrown away in 2016 included a million tons of chargers alone. The U.S. accounted for 6.3 million metric tons, partly due to the fact that the American market for heavy goods is saturated. The original study can be found here (PDF; Google Drive link).
Really? Come on...
Exactly: ...
(1) Buy a used car -- the best car, environmentally -- is one where the energy/materials used in manufacturing have already been spent.
(2) Keep your appliances 10-20 years, even if less efficient. Buy simple appliances (dishwashers/washers/fridges with dial electromechanical controls that can be easily fixed) so they last you a decade or two.
(3) Buy an upgradeable computer or laptop -- Lenovo and some Dells are great in this respect. Not stuff like Smurface or iPad that are sealed with glue and where it's barely worth replacing a battery.
(4) Buy a phone with removable battery and SD-expandable storage. Moto G4 Play and G5 are great. Or just carry a flip phone which will last you 10 years
(5) Buy hardware that doesn't require a cloud service to work correctly. With cloud-mandatory hardware, the manufacturer can pull the rug out after a year or two and you'll have little recourse.
They're probably responsible for half of this e-waste.
The same as the poundage from accidently discarded BitCoins..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Without better disposal/recycling options, it's going to continue to be like this. People aren't going to put in the effort to search out methods of recycling electronics, hazardous waste like propane tanks, etc, and people don't have space to store that shit to wait for the once a month/quarter/whatever event for actually doing so. The fact that the trash and recycling service that we already pay for doesn't do this is astounding to me.
Maybe they could make some pudding.
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This is what happens when Microsoft and big government collude to put recycling company CEO's in jail.
Big industry LOVES selling new stuff, they HATE when people re-use old stuff. Can't make quarterly sales goals if everybody is re-using old stuff and not buying new.
Bleh, here's one in much higher quality.
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He was given dominion over the various and sundry living things on the Earth. He was put in the garden of Eden to dress and keep it. That last would be the closest parallel. We've done a particularly poor job of "keeping it".
Innovation is over-rated. The main innovation in computing over the past 10 years has been better walled gardens. These help the manufacturers' bottom lines, not the end-users.
but then only outlaws will own soldering irons and glue guns. please think of the children.
On the same playing field, companies would innovate within these new constraints.
If they can do it for the "cult of thin", they can do it for repairability.
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That's not necessarily all bad. Those older chargers (big wall warts that get warm when charging) wasted a lot of energy. The new small ones are much more efficient.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Universal charging is what USB-C is trying to do -- voltage peaks at 20 volts DC.
OK, this is stating the obvious, but there might be less e-waste if (a) the stuff was more durable, and (b) fewer companies ran on a forced obsolescence business plan. Just sayin'.
We are past the days where every device had a different, proprietary charger. A few well-made charging solutions save money in the long run over a big box of junk.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
First and foremost, we need to quit exporting our 'trash'. This is a resource that should be kept local and used.
Seriously, we have robotics that can dissemble many of the electronics. Some of it, i.e. the plastics, can, and should, be used for a thermal electricity. At the same time,the rest should be melted down and separated into various elements and then used right away, or stored. FOr example, the mercury and lead can be stored in old mines, until a new use is found for them (and we will).
The electricity generation and selling of some of the elements (gold, silver, etc) will likely pay for the rest.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The fridge: buy a new fan motor, install it yasself. Will probably take less time than buying/installing a new fridge.
As far as the warranties, many electronics are thrown out not because they're broken, but because they're unfashionable. I can't count how much good stuff I've picked up waiting for "recycling" on the street.
Laptops: buy Lenovo or commercial/gov't grade Dell. Far better than new Macs. The newer iMacs have a fragile glass screen *glued* over the innards -- sound familiar? The newer MacBooks have no way to upgrade storage or RAM and a dearth of ports.
Yeah, I also had a Canon camera of that type break. I had it packed in a bag for a flight and the power button accidentally was pressed, causing the lens to extend where there was no room for it to do so -- broke the mechanism. I went with a Nikon DSLR with no such issues for the next camera.
The Earth weighs 5,972,000,000,000,000 million tons
Of course waste is bad. But big numbers are meaningless unless some sort of frame is defined.
will provide the greatest mitigation to this condition. I currently use a Pixel that I purchased directly from Google. The battery will die completely before the phone becomes obsolete from a software perspective. It is only the second smart phone I have owned. Before that I probably went through 7 phones since the 90's.
While discarding electronics into dumps isn't great, it's not entirely terrible because it can still be recycled and it's not actively harming the environment sitting in a dump. What is terrible is all the CO2 being released into the air because while it can be recycled it is actively harming the environment. We will eventually move to 100% recycling but we will also have to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere which is going to require a LOT of energy.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So, the weight of the waste doesn't matter nearly as much as the volume and obviously any related hazardous materials. With the US producing more waste than any other nation, I thought this perspective was useful...
From howstuffworks:
The Great Pyramid in Egypt is 756 feet by 756 feet at the base and is 481 feet tall, and anyone who has seen it in real life knows that it's a huge thing -- one of the biggest things ever built by man. If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in 100 years and piled it up in the shape of the Great Pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. So the base of this trash pyramid would be about 4.5 miles by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost 3 miles high
Just another day in Paradise
Clearly there's money to be made on this stuff... so after the dump gets paid to take in the shit that could have been recycled, why don't they separate it and ship it off to the recycling centre for more money?
"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill." -- CEO Nwabudike Morgan
valuable mineral deposits of the future.
I'd happily pay $15 more per unit for a computer that's not e-waste after two years. Sockets are cheap.
Alarmist nonsense. God gave man dominion over the Earth to do as he pleases. [etc etc]
For a moment I thought you were being serious. Seems to have gone over the heads of other responders though.
Link to a page with the report. Direct link to the PDF.
A couple of tidbits that I, personally, found interesting:
- The definition of E-waste: "all items of electrical and electronic equipment and its parts that have been discarded by its owner as waste without the intent of re-use". This includes everything from appliances to solar cells to smartphones.
- On a per-person basis, E-waste is highest in Europe, the Americas and Oceania. However, Europe had the highest recycling rate (35%).
- Unstated, but North America is likely the biggest generator, because the figures given are for "the Americas", which includes North, Central and South in one big lump. That's a really odd decision, for a way to group countries.
- The report claims that only 20% of E-waste is recycled through "appropriate" channels, but they do not define what an "appropriate channel" is.
Living in Europe, I do not believe the recycling figures. In many European countries - and certainly where I live - it would be very difficult *not* to recycle an appliance. Sure, a small charger may land in a wastebasket, but a washing machine? A refrigerator? We don't have public dumps, and these don't fit in a municipal garbage bag. - the recycling center is the only possible place to dispose of these. More: recycling is free (actually: pre-paid with the original purchase price). The last figures I saw nationally were well over 70%, and I suspect the rates are a lot higher by now.
Now, how the recycling companies work is a different matter. Some of them ship the devices to unlicensed or fraudulent companies in Africa or Asia for disassembly, which is often...um...suboptimal. But that is an entirely different problem, actually an enforcement problem since this behavior is (afaik) illegal.
The US has a much bigger problem - not only with E-waste, but with garbage in general. Hauling your garbage off to dumps and burying it, having zero control over what lands in those dumps, geez. Separate the bulk recyclables, incinerate the trash (free electricity + heat), run the ash through separators to recover more metals and minerals. But no, it gets buried, the dumps will eventually leak, and future generations will have to clean it all up.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Apple has the most recalcitrant approach to repairs, and their response to customers' inquires on repairability is a thinly veiled "Fuck you kindly". Apple can get away with this because it has a captive audience, plus it offers them something they care about, such as a seamless experience and stuff - I don't know very well as i am not an Apple product user but I am not so stupid that I'd deprecate all of Apple's advantages. However, it is infuriating that the entire computer industry is now following them in the footsteps making non-repairable products, never releasing schematics, and never making spare parts available. This is a shit trend that starts with Apple and Apple is the master in forced obsolescence + unfixability.
It kind of makes me even more angry thinking of the independent repair shops jumping through hoops to source spare parts by cannibalizing broken Apple motherboards. That's just kind of humiliating. F you, Apple.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
If you buy a computer you can upgrade, then you will... throwing out old electronics, so you lost all of the benefit.
Meanwhile the iPad 2 I bought for my wife at launch in 2011 (!) is still used daily and works fine. Some day I may replace it, but then it can become a digital picture frame.
She also uses daily my "non upgradable" MacBook Pro 17" from 2010 while many other windows laptops of that vintage are in a scrap heap so how has it hurt to buy a laptop of higher quality that can last a decade or more?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
a steam powered fridge. Some of us have to make do with the old fashion electric ones.
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from the US. Mostly the hazardous stuff. I'm actually a bit worried. Right at a time when we need some extra oversight on how waste is going to be disposed we've got a head of the EPA on record saying he'd end it if he could.
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That's how commercial (restaurant) walk in fridges work. It would have another advantage -- people won't have to rebuild their kitchens whenever a built-in fridge fails -- just replace the cooling unit with a standardized pack.
Until they will release USB-D after some years or whatever it will be called. Remember there will always be a new USB plug created every few years.
GE fridge, its not quite 3 years old, the fan makes a noise because the bearings in it are stuffed I'm guessing, not worth getting it fixed, I hate GE now, GE of all companies should be-able to build a fridge with parts that last longer than 5 minutes. Will put up with it until I can afford to throw it away and buy something different.
I worked at GE for a while. Their appliance division in Louisville, KY is now owned by the Chinese. But, .... When they were still building appliances, they would have engineers build and test prototypes. After the reliability goals were obtained, the designs were passed to MBA's, purchasing agents, and accountants that would do what they called a "cost out". They were charged with finding cheaper suppliers, and the cheaper parts are what went into production. The only posters of "successful" employees I saw hung, were those in the "millionaire" club. People who had found a million dollars worth of savings in the way of cheaper parts.
Guess why your appliance is a POS.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
How many people have a cardboard box of perfectly good Wall Warts that are for unknown devices? We need to start mandating power sources that are common format. These things should be standardized - like what happened with 95% of Cell phones and the Micro USB. That became a pseudo standard for many devices that are still usable! The countless devices have particular Voltage and Current and connector specs and so on.. Standarizing Wall warts goes against business practice, but would clearly put us (humans) on a better path. We dont have to save the earth, we just have to keep it inhabitable!
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
My small city has a yearly e-waste recycle day but I don't drive so I can't take a printer/copier to the location. It could be repaired with a new print head and ink tanks but the repair place is 25 miles away. I would like to see a program that would allow me to call and have the item picked up. And repaired.
Explain your problem and ask them to see if someone will take it to a charity shop or what other contacts they may have who will take it off you.
Mom moved us here when we were kids and I've been stuck ever since.
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