Refurbish and repairing viable electronics does not help keep Apple's, Google's or any manufacturer's stock high. Stock spikes high when the news organizations can talk about all the latest hardware and how sales doing well. Why would those companies CEOs want to hurt their golden package before exiting the industry?

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.

It's a software problem too. To have the same capabilities my phone did when it was new a few years ago, I have to find 3rd party play store backups to get apps with the right SDK to install. The bootloader isn't unlockable. Samsung won't provide updates. Google is actively hostile to providing apps which work (both not hosting the working versions and abusing things like their power over the signing keys to quickly deprecate old Android SDKs).

This is also why general purpose computers should not be crippled by the manufacturer. Or at least there should be a way to uncripple them.

> Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed... which is what probably scares the corporate oligarchy

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.

I second this opinion. Here's an older article which is less dramatised and talks about attempted interventions such as trying to get the recyclers to use wire strippers instead of burning: https://www.worstpolluted.org/projects_reports/display/107

As an electrical engineer I am with you. There are machines to cut the cables and shred printed circuit boards to smallest pieces and recycle all the valuable materials. Even sort out plastic enclosure parts or glass by corresponding densities.

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.

>People should understand that proper clean electronic waste recycling does exist. [..] This is more a portrayal of extreme poverty than anything.

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.

These guys are cheaper than the simple cheap machines that automatically strip insulation from wires.

That's how it always was. People were eating only the best parts of the animal and dumping the rest. More over, the best is converted mostly to sh*t and dumped too. Fish do the same.

> It’s so easy to just mindlessly want and consume until you see pictures like these

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 can consume less, give new life to old electronics, etc. and seeing these pictures validates the feeling I have for it.

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.

This is why the “MKBHD” etc type youtubers who worship “new tech” and do unboxing videos have always bothered me.

To be fair, part of the feel good for consume is the recycling centers in the west that are largely complete scams. Because they just aggregate the waste to ship to the third world for """"recycling""""

This not “well run” landfill literally exists because the companies/countries dumping their e-waste here do not want to pay for the “well run” ones.

We did war over energy, now we burn energy just to find out who can burn the most and give them a token (bitcoin) or get neighbors to fight each other on which can get the biggest SUV or sports car that guzzles like 2 or more optimized cars.

Imbesi's Law of the Conservation of Filth: In order for something to become clean, something else must become dirty.

Correct. Some friends and I started saying "throw it aways" instead. I think it much better describes the actual situation. It didn't really catch on, though I wish it would.

What makes you assume planned obsolescence is at play here, and not just regular old obsolescence? I suspect the two-decade-old large-format CRTs on display in that shop aren't there due to a lack of replacement parts.

idk, that looked like an awful lot of ewaste and 0 car tires. Probably just need to borrow the deposit system that car tires use where you pay a large fee (not the 5 cents that plastic bottles use) when buying tires unless you return an equivalent amount.

You have looked at a problem and proposed a bunch of completely irrelevant solutions.

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.

This rhetoric is outdated by more than 200 years, when kids worked at coal mines in 18th century Britain.

Total cost of ownership.

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.

I don't know, I recently saw electric drills for €29 at Aldi and to my surprise they used brushless motors! They will probably last an eternity for hobbyist (minus the batteries).

Regarding batteries specifically, it should be illegal to produce any device without user-replaceable batteries. The EU is at the forefront of these initiatives[1], as usual, so hopefully this trickles out to other governments.

Batteries in EVs are also a growing problem, for both production and disposal. Hopefully we'll have similar regulations there as well.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/24/23771064/european-union-b...

59 million tons is a cube 390m on a side, or a square pile 10m high and 2500m on a side.

It’s a lot, but let’s not hyperventilate.

It is indeed heartbreaking. But I don't see moral outrage solving the issue any time soon. People will rather forget about this reality than stop the consumption.

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.

Trillion-dollar companies that produce this crap are sitting back in their skyscrapers saying "not our problem, something-something the market "

A lot of the items on the pictures look like 15+ years old equipment. People don't use CRT TVs or cassette decks, but not because they broke down on schedule. Not saying that planned obsolescence is not an issue, but even if a piece of equipment serves you for decades, you still need a good plan on how it could be disposed of properly.

> The other end is... you.

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.

Trickle down economics at its finest.

There is some drone footage here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdPGO6sfc3c, also google maps has a good view https://maps.app.goo.gl/KwdiwCzF4sThGLVf9

> 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.

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.

It doesn't matter how big the dump is, it shouldn't exist from first principles.

Think about how incredibly worked out these devices are, how many brilliant people worked to design them, to figure out how to source the materials, how to combine them, etc... Miracles of engineering they are. Everything planned out carefully.

And then you throw them away.

That's the idea. It's not an accident. The lifecycle of these machines was designed.

It's fucking insane. The best you can say about it is that it's not quite as insane as animal sacrifice.