>> Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed.

This isn't just the hardware makers, its also software makers.

A ton of the software gets sunset on older versions of Android. Older OnePlus phones, Sony and Google phones are being repurposed for Ubuntu Touch or Sailfish OS because many apps will only work on a specific Android version and up. Same thing with the Google Play store. If you have an older phone that works fine - that's great, too bad none of the software can run on it because modern apps are bloated, you need 12GB of RAM on your phone now. Oh sure you can technically run it, but it won't rune well.

I have three or four Windows phones that still run, but are completely worthless because the software can't be updated because the only browser that you could use was Explorer. Now that MS upgraded to Edge, these phones are worthless. Same thing with the Windows apps. I was able to use One Note on my Lumia 950 just as a stand alone note taker, but now it won't update because MS says it doesn't support that older version and I can't update it.

I agree 100% hardware makers are one of the reasons, but there's a massive issue with the software makers who do the same thing and essentially stop supporting older versions of their software that run fine on these older devices.

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).

One of the nasty impacts comes from the low-tech metal recovery process that washes out heavy metals like cadmium, mercury, lead, arsenic into the sea. Fish from the West coast of Africa are basically lethal to eat.

Did a podcast with a researcher named Gerry McGovern (World Wide Waste) on this a couple of years ago [0].

Something that impedes recycling and repair is status display. I was proud of the old Nokia I kept for 10 years, all stuck together with tape, despite the scowls and snickers from the crowd with their latest iPhone who supposed I must be some freakish homeless person who wandered in - instead of their project leader/CTO. That was back in the days when meetings always started with an animalistic display of getting your tech out on the table to pose with. Somehow that little Nokia really emasculated and pissed them off. These were the same people who could talk about "efficiency" all day long, but the actual reality of doing more with less undermined some more powerful, lower drive.

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/andy-farnell-perils-of...

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.

We need a law that requires manufacturers to, in the very least, provide the documentation and keys to install an open source OS on their devices when they drop support for the things.

> Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed...

You buy a device with a rechargeable battery, the device has an expected lifetime of 15 years but the battery is dead after 5. I try to open the device, but it’s clearly not designed to be opened. After prying with knives, etc I get it open and see that it’s not a standard cell, like 18650, but a custom pack. I emailed the manufacturer and they reply with ‘we don’t make it any more’

So I am on to my 3rd beard trimmer. And I buy the most expensive model available, it’s not like I am cheating out.

Same issue with wireless mice, keyboards, everything

I tend to go to my local town's e-waste collection at the end of every month in search of interesting gems to take home and repair. I find that the majority of e-waste that I see is 10+ year old tvs, 15+ year old Desktop pcs from the P4/core 2 era, and broken LCDs (as in the screen is cracked). Maybe my town is just really frugal but it seems like home users really do hold onto their devices for quite a while.

One thing I do see more often is really low end stuff: generic Chromebooks, all those Chinese knockoffs of popular items (tablets, picture frames etc.). No name electronics (ie Speakers, mp3 players, other consumer electronic junk.) Anything moderately mid tier or higher is used until the 10+ year mark. I suspect that all these items never really saw much use to begin with and with the low spec nature of many of these items, even if they were fully open what could people really do with most of them?

I still totally agree with your stance but I am not sure how much of the bulk it would reduce.

hardware that you don't "own" is also a big problem,

support ended? too bad.

company is bankrupt? too bad.

There are actually reasons that phones specifically can't last 20 years: We keep changing wireless standards. When it was mandated that all phones in the US must support VoLTE, I had two phones that were instantly turned into e-waste: An aging Xperia XA2 (that I miss dearly) and an ASUS ROG Phone 2 (good riddance) that was only 6 months old. Until we can come up with an energy-efficient and tamper-resistant SDR for phones, this will be the hard limiting factor for useful phone age.

> I've been repairing and maintaining iPhone 5's, 7's, and 8's that are no where near their end of life.

There's an iPhone 6 I've come into possession of because someone I know was throwing theirs away, so I asked could I have it to play with. I notice you conspicuously said 5, 7 and 8. What software do you run on them to keep them going? As far as I understand it, there's no alternative app stores or ROMs to flash on iPhones. And is there anything about the 6 I should know?

Great comment anyway, I'm in full agreement - making devices last longer is essential, empowering and fun.

Conterpoint: Phone are small and replace so much more stuff: radio, flashlight, camera, video recorder, landlines, computers, etc.

Grind them up and recycle the metals in them.

in 20 years the tech will be so far more advanced and will lead to even more dematerialisation.

The real waste is the waste of human potential by social media that is destroying the yought for profit.

Repairing my old iphone does not give me a fancy new AI camera though. My followers would be mad about that

Agree! The push for "right to repair" isn't just about individual choice

> 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.

When I was in school there was some discussion of the product lifecycle which included some engineering considerations for recycling. It seems to me the consumer electronics industry has become actively hostile not just to repair but also safe recycling.

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

> we need to ensure that electronic waste doesn't end up being dumped on random impoverished towns in Africa

Wouldn't this further impoverish those who get work from said dumps?

The real issue seems to be that they have no alternatives. If they could get a $5000/Yr job making textiles there'd be no appetite for diving into rubbish.

This issue is less about halting electronics consumption entirely and more about creating responsible systems for recycling.

>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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

I just sold one of these last year on a local marketplace website. Mine had a working home button but was otherwise similar to yours. I think I got $40 USD for it.

I feel like there's probably someone out there who would still get some use out of it if you gave it away, and might even be willing to pay you a small amount of money for it.

At least it’s found a new life as a toy

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.

Right to repair just means for those that do want to repair it, they can without any undue burden.

If you don't want to repair it, nobody is forcing you to! Just throw it away like you would have done anyways.

The point of right to repair is that there is a non-zero amount of people who want to repair stuff and it shouldn't cost the people who don't anything extra... It's a "right" not an "obligation"...

> I still haven’t figured out what to do with the old unit

I don't have a success percentage to offer you, but I've seen quite a lot of that kind of thing in the "free" section of Craigslist. There are all kinds of folks who grab that stuff for parts, for the challenge, or who knows

I've also seen mixed opinions about the best way to use that section: one audience thinks "put it on the curb, announce the fact you did so, the end" and the other audience is against that because it could cause multiple people to drive to what could be an empty curb by the time they get there. I'd say go with whichever causes you the least emotional stress: fielding bazillions of Craigslist emails or running the risk of inadvertent climate change contributions

I don't want to fix it myself either, and I don't see how a repair industry could exist without the right to repair.

> I don’t know anyone that wants a partially functioning stovetop

Maybe some repair shop wants to buy it cheap, to repair, and to sell for profit? Or not buy, but to repair it to you for a fraction of the price of a new stove top?

> Also, the new stovetop is far more energy efficient than the old one with is yet another balancing aspect of replacing old tech.

This is the killer. If new things are better then it may be not economically viable to repair.

Put it up on craigslist (or whatever is popular in your area) for free and label it "as-is, needs repair". Odds are decent that someone will take it off your hands with the intention of fixing it and getting a free stove top.

Good on you for trying to contact local e-waste! I feel most people (incl my uncle) just toss and forget

you just admitted that you're the problem. "new stovetop is far more energy efficient than the old one" how so? does it magically produce more heat from nothing?

Maybe I shouldn't have eaten that tuna from Ghana

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.

[flagged]

I've replaced batteries in a handful of newer smartphones. It's certainly more of a pain in the rear than on devices who's batteries were meant to be swappable, but it's still do-able. iFixit has parts, guides, and difficulty ratings for a lot of devices.

https://www.sustaphones.com/ has a list of Android devices with up-to-date community ROMs and iFixit battery replacement guides.

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

I'm confused. What does space travel have to do with this?

My guess is at the city they are in? Wouldn't that just make sense?

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).

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.

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 "

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.

Trickle down economics at its finest.

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.

> 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.

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

Pictures are always taken from a very low angle and make it look much larger than it is. Behind the electronics area there is the riverbed. When you look at the picture, you might think the „dump site“ goes on and on. It doesn’t.

Trust me, I visited the place in 2014. Of course I had read about the place before. When I got out of the car, first impression was that our driver didn’t bring us to the right spot. It is not that big actually. The waste was mostly domestic then, judging from what I saw (CRTs for example).

Agbogbloshie is so much more than the processing of e-waste. Think of it as a commercial area. There was a large market for onions and other products. There were workshops where people build gas stoves out of car rims. Dismantling cars was big business. There was a Coca Cola Factory on the other side of the road. The air quality was really bad but it was mainly caused by burning tires, not cables. You cannot have tires sitting around there because they will always catch water (in any orientation) and therefore be a breeding bed for anopheles, which is the vector for malaria as you may be aware of.

Over all, the people who worked with electronics, not only the scrapers but also the people who actually repair and sell things, where only a fraction of the people living, working and trading goods there.

It might look different today. Government cleaned the riverbed at least once in order to prevent floorings. There were also attempts to move the onion market. Don’t know if that really happened. I am not saying everything was fine there. Working with e-waste is dangerous. There are unhealthy levels of lead and other things in the soil and in the people. But there was neither the infrastructure nor the workers to process significant loads of foreign e-waste. Even 15,000 tons per year (figures thrown around then in western media where an order of magnitude higher) is two heavy trucks per day.

I will post a few other sources later but have to sleep now. But check this out:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01973...

One of the authors is a geographer at the University of Ghana. Full paper should be available via your local library or sci-hub.

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.