Given the awful environmental cost of "disposable tech", everyone should care about reducing waste and extending the working life of our hardware if only for that reason.
Of course it's also bad for society that we have so little effective competition in tech markets now that users think substandard products and user-hostile behaviours are normal. The race to the bottom is bad for everyone, and everyone being sold those products is being abused in the name of profit, whether or not any given individual is aware of how much it is happening to them or understands that better alternatives exist.
At least rest of us can be less hypocritical, If we have decided to call out companies for their lackluster climate action then contributing to the e-waste disaster by selling blackboxes should be on the list.
Sure, but not everyone has the same opportunities. So I'd say we should focus on the best we _can_ do personally.
It's better for me to focus on recycling my electronics than focusing on the ecological impact of the modern commercial satellites madness. Because I cannot do anything about Starlink and the likes, but I can recycle my phone.
I've advocated similar as a possible way of countering other consumer-hostile practices in the past but for something like batteries I think we're already past that point.
E-waste is a huge but so far mostly overlooked problem. Built-in obsolescence is great for exploitative businesses and bad for basically everyone and everything else. Unnecessarily restricting hardware repair or replacement might be the largest contributory factor in this problem.
It would be a far better use of everyone's time if instead of returning this to them or sending dead batteries back, we all put that energy into lobbying to permanently kill these types of industries.
While I do agree that e-waste is a real problem, it’s not like we can just sit with old tech and say “nah, that’s good enough.” We need both more and better fabs, and better waste handling / recycling.
agreed. e-waste is a massive problem that most techies would rather ignore. most of our toxic electronic waste ends up in the third world, poisoning environments.
I disagree. People/nations should clean up their own mess, without polluting the environment (of others) even further by shipping things back and forth.
My advice: keep your e-waste around as an investment. Once the mines have been depleted its worth will probably go up...
On a more serious note: stop buying needless crap. Minimalism ftw.
Let's produce even more e-waste please. Let's do our best to end this quick, maybe in the next turn of the wheel we'll get better cards (or smarter humans that can live with a "dumb" house)
Those are fair points. With the amount of e-waste currently in existence I'd think we would want to address those sooner rather than later, but it's easy for everyone to just kick the can down the road.
Is it recycling that needs to be implemented or go ever deeper at the source and crack down on disposable, unfixable, ephemeral gadgets? Seems to be more of a greed rush problem, fix it in the future and make more money type of issue at the root of it. Recycling isn't necessarily not useful but attacking the wrong root cause of e-waste.
Right. I can't agree with you more about smothering the planet in mostly-unnecessary stuff. I'm truly fed up with the fact that almost every appliance or bit of gear we buy is designed with a short limited life and not meant to be serviced. No wonder the world is awash with e-waste and similar broken/junked stuff. Once, just about every bit of electronics I bought or owned I could fix, now I can't even open up gear without smashing my way inside because it's glued up or snapped shut with one-use-only one-way snap-lock catches, etc. It's a damn disgrace.
Two weeks ago the USB socket on my Netgear modem became intermittent and I literally had to smash my way through the plastic case to get inside to gain access to the circuit board. Unfortunately, in doing so I damaged something else which (I think) has rendered it useless (I'll know for sure when I get a chance to take a microscope to the PWA). The fact remains that I haven't been able change a 20 cent socket and to save time I've had to buy a new device!
It seems to me that green and ecological movements should do more in this area to stop the millions of tons of e-waste—and getting behind Right to Repair movements is a good place to start.
The whole phone e-waste discussion is virtue signaling in its worst form.
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