Electronic Waste: We Must Design Gadgets that Don't Poison the Planet

[unhappycamper]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/12/15-4



We discard huge amounts of electronics every year, creating a toxic wasteland – often in the poorest countries

Electronic Waste: We Must Design Gadgets that Don't Poison the Planet
by The Observer editorial
Published on Sunday, December 15, 2013 by The Guardian

Record sales of tablets, laptops and smart phones. Ever smaller computers, and thinner televisions, brighter screens and sharper cameras. What could possibly be wrong with the worldwide explosion in sales of electrical and digital equipment seen (Photo: Scallop Holden/ cc via Flickr)this Christmas? Consumers love the sleek designs and the new connectivity they offer, businesses can't make enough for a vast and hungry global market, and governments see technological innovation and turnover as the quick way out of recession. This is a new age of the machine and electronic equipment is indispensable in home and workplace.

But there is a downside to the revolution that governments and companies have so far ignored. In the drive to generate fast turnover and new sales, companies have deliberately made it impossible to repair their goods and have shortened the lifespan of equipment.

Hardware is designed not to keep up with software, a computer's life is now under two years and mobile phones are upgraded every few months. Many electronic devices now have parts that cannot be removed or replaced. From being cheaper to buy new devices than to repair them, it has now reached the point where it is impossible to repair them at all.

The result is that much electronic equipment is impossible to recycle. As devices are miniaturised, they become increasingly complex. A single laptop may contain hundreds of different substances, dozens of metals, plastics and components which are expensive to dispose of. As we saw last week from Ghana, vast quantities of this dangerous "e-waste" is being dumped on developing countries where it is left to some of the poorest people to try to extract what they can in dangerous conditions.

[PamW]

1. One of the problems.....

One of the problems you have is that the materials chosen are chosen because they have certain properties that are desired.

All of our sophisticated electronics work the way they do because of the actions of all the tiny transistors acting as "on/off" logic switches. Transistors are by necessity made of semiconductors like silicon or germanium.

The materials are chose because those are the materials that work to make transistors.

If biodegradable organic materials could be used for semiconductors; then we'd use them.

Until someone discovers a biodegradable material that can be made into a transistor; we will make our electronics out of non-biodegradable materials.

PamW

[quadrature]

2. what happens to old iPhones? ....nt

[NNadir]

3. If that happens, the solar industry is going under.

It's just as well. It consumes tons of money without producing very much.