Manufacturers have made it difficult to repair devices, and replacing them is often an easier and less expensive solution for consumers, further contributing to the already-dire climate crisis, says an article published in CNN.
Cole Stratton on smart phones
“The greenest smartphone is the one you already own,” said Cole Stratton, an associate instructor at Indiana University Bloomington, who has studied tech supply chains.
“Smartphones seem so small and inconsequential, so unless you’ve studied the supply chains and realized everything that goes into creating [them], you just have no sense of how environmentally devastating these things are.”
Right to Repair Movement
The growing “right-to-repair” movement could help.
Right-to-repair advocates, including Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak, are calling for laws that would require device makers to release the tools, parts, and repair manuals necessary to allow consumers to have their products fixed by independent shops — or to do it themselves.
European regulators, meanwhile, have been out front on right-to-repair, implementing rules earlier this year that require manufacturers of devices like washing machines and TV displays to make parts and repair manuals available to third parties for repairs.
Right-to-repair advocates hope the recent regulatory attention will be the momentum needed to finally push manufacturers to make repairs accessible more broadly.
Biological hazard
The world’s scientists concluded in August that it is “unequivocal” humans have caused the climate crisis and confirmed that widespread and irreversible changes have already occurred.
“If we can’t repair our stuff, the consequences are we throw a lot more away,” Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association, a coalition fighting for the right to repair, told CNN.
The Production Hitch
The supply chain for consumer electronics is global and complex, making it hard to quantify the full scope of its environmental impact, experts say.
But data that some companies make public can help paint the picture.
iPhone13 Environmental Drawbacks
With the iPhone 13, for example, 81% of the 64 kilograms of carbon emissions generated by a single device comes from the production process alone, before it is transported to shelves, according to Apple.
On an individual scale, that’s not much.
Then, apply a similar calculation to the countless other personal devices we use each day — laptops, desktops, tablets, smartwatches, smart speakers, smart headphones, and so on — and you begin to get a sense of the carbon footprint of manufacturing new consumer electronics.
“Everything that happens before the device reaches you is very materially and energetically intensive — that’s where the most greenhouse gasses are emitted and where the most violent ecological transformation takes place,” Stratton said.
Right to Repair Situation
Some device makers have been working to increase their use of more sustainable materials in production.
Many big device makers have designed products in a way that makes them difficult to repair without specialized equipment and instructions, and have limited the authorized repair shops where customers can access such repairs without compromising their device’s warranty.
And it boosts sales if consumers must replace their devices every few years.
Gordon-Byrne Defends
“We always had a right to repair our stuff because we paid for it, but we’ve just lost it as a society,” Gordon-Byrne said.
Advocates say these restrictions strip the public of their right to do what they want with products they own and disadvantage small repair businesses that could be helping to preserve more old devices if they could access the proper resources.
The Tech Discounts
Tech Dump is an electronics recycling facility in Minnesota that also repairs and resells old devices through its store, Tech Discounts.
It processes between 3 million and 4 million pounds of electronics each year, but can only fix and resell about 10% of the devices it takes in.
“We have brilliant technicians, and our team has figured out how to repair stuff without needing the repair manual from the manufacturer,” Tech Dump CEO Amanda LaGrange told CNN.
“We could scale much faster, we could repair much more if we were able to affordably access repair parts and affordably access repair manuals.”
Puckett’s Efforts
Puckett and a team attempted to follow the geolocating tracking devices that his organization and experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The team dropped devices at recyclers and donation centers across the United States that he said branded themselves as “eco-friendly” and “sustainable” and have “strict control of exportation” to developing countries.
But Puckett’s team found that roughly a third of the electronics they tracked ended up overseas, in places like Pakistan, Thailand, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Kenya, with 87% of those devices landing in Asia, particularly rural Hong Kong.
The Eye-Opener
When Puckett and his team arrived at one of their first destinations in Hong Kong — which they found using the GPS coordinates on the device trackers — he said they found workers dismantling e-waste negligently.
Manufacturers, in particular, should consider the harm devices and their components can cause to the environment when disposed of, Puckett said.
“You’ve got to get the toxicity out and design things to last a long time from the get-go,” Puckett said.
What Concerns LaGrange?
The total mass of e-waste is declining as devices get smaller, according to a 2020 Yale study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.
But experts worry that with the coming “internet of things” revolution — where everything from watches to refrigerators is becoming consumer electronic devices — the amount of waste could tick back up.
“The Internet of Things is terrifying to every person in my job because we’re just seeing piles and piles of electronic waste coming,” said LaGrange, who has been advocating for right-to-repair for nearly seven years.
“The fact that we are still having this conversation is surprising,” she said.
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Source: CNN Business
