An e-waste dumping ground

https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/10/05/g-s1-6411/electronics-public-health-waste-ghana-phones-computers

by andsoitis • 2 years ago

400 294 2 years ago

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

This is really heartbreaking to see and dystopian.

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.

greedylizard• 2 years ago

go there and try to invest in ways to clean up the practice.

You think the problem that needs to be solved is “there”? This sentence makes me question whose consumption you’re referring to in the previous sentence.

BirAdam2• 2 years ago

A bit of a controversial take, but I think the reason that this won’t get solved is the AGW movement. Rather than addressing things like pollution, waste, strip mining, environmental toxicity, and so on the green movement was hijacked to care about a single aspect of environmentalism because rich people could get even richer trading carbon futures.

beepbooptheory• 2 years ago

What is this thing that is both heartbreaking but without any reason for outrage? Like getting rejected from the school dance?

gosub100• 2 years ago

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

carlgreene• 2 years ago

It’s so easy to just mindlessly want and consume until you see pictures like these. They show that although my streets are pristine, with everyone having the latest “stuff”, it’s really only possible because we sweep all of the “bad stuff” under the proverbial rug

paulcole4• 2 years ago

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.

maeil2• 2 years ago

This is of course untrue, given that we know that there are people who have changed their behaviour after learning about realities through articles such as this one. And a huge percentage of people still haven't learned about them. In one's highly-educated HN-reading savvy bubble, it might be easy to assume that surely by now everyone knows the realities, has seen all of them, and if they behave a certain way it's simply due to the degree to which they care.

I've been prone to such biases myself, but the truth is very different. Billions of people, including hundreds of millions in wealthy regions, still simply do not know about this. They genuinely do not know that e.g. plastic recycling is a fantasy. They have not seen these images. Of course, many have and just don't care as long as their streets are pristine - the people you're talking about very much exist. But there's even more people who are simply unaware.

It's very easy to take a nihilist view that nothing matters, as it completely absolves oneself of any potential responsibility whatsoever. But it doesn't reflect reality.

delfinom2• 2 years ago

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""""

tonyedgecombe• 2 years ago

The West or America? I don't think we are in any way perfect in Europe but it does feel like we have a better handle on this stuff than the US.

artursapek4• 2 years ago

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

y-curious2• 2 years ago

Wait til you find out about disposable vaporizers people buy in the states, use up in a week, and throw out. Those don't even get a chance to be recycled, and they're a relatively complex electronic.

piva00• 2 years ago

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.

karles• 2 years ago

Morally, caring is the only option.

To many people don't value values or morals, and only prioritize their own experiences. I find it hard to maintain relationships with people who only talk about their career, business and consumption, as it is hard to have any kind of discussion about "we COULD, but SHOULD we" in regards to purchasing the latest car, iphone, a new house etc.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

One must cultivate one's own garden.

You'll never change people. It makes me sad as well.

will5421• 2 years ago

An individual can't do the job of government.

bubaumba• 2 years ago

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.

consp• 2 years ago

And because it always has been we should keep doing it no matter what. Also fish do it so it's a good excuse to do the same.

TonyTrapp• 2 years ago

No, that is a relatively recent development. There are many old recipes involving body parts of animals that many people no longer consider eating these days. Back then, as many parts of the animal were used for consumption or other use as possible.

mbs159• 2 years ago

People were eating only the best parts of the animal and dumping the rest.

That's not true. As recently as 50 years ago my relatives had pigs and they ate or otherwise used every single part of the animal, even the teeth, without throwing anything out. And they weren't poor, either. It was simply a mindset of utilizing what you have to the best of your ability.

29athrowaway• 2 years ago

I would rather call this: the receiving end of planned obsolescence.

The other end is... you.

exitb• 2 years ago

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.

tivert2• 2 years ago

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.

Nasrudith• 2 years ago

Is the manufacturer really the best default handler for waste? Companies are incredibly mortal and the 'big corporation that is guaranteed to outlive you and can be counted on for things like pensions' days are gone. Trying to get the CRT factories to take back the old sets just doesn't work when they have been out of business for decades.

This is starting to sound like the place for a government to ensure that the disposal is some sort of tax stamp/deposit and carried out by some entity, whether direct government, manufacturer while they are still around to reclaim their deposit, or paid recycling contractors.

4ndrewl• 2 years ago

You can't throw things away. You can only move them somewhere else.

riskable• 2 years ago

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

tomrod• 2 years ago

Reminds me of entropy.

schrectacular• 2 years ago

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.

BirAdam2• 2 years ago

Yeah… In 2019, the world wasted more than 59.1 million tons of electronics. That's the equivalent of around 350 large cruise ships that are completely filled with e-waste. Most of it used to be due to slow and/or bloated software, but more of it is now batteries. There’s also a bit of just poor manufacturing/design where a device was never good, and therefore as soon as its owner could get better he/she did get better.

Edit: and let’s not forget the deprecation of older standards like 2G and 3G cell networks, or the rise of USB-C.

imiric5• 2 years ago

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...

hbossy• 2 years ago

Used batteries themselves are not that much of a problem, because most of their value is in raw minerals used to make them. Recycling them is basically the same as processing raw metal ore, except the concentration of valuable stuff is much higher than in any natural deposit.

FredPret• 2 years ago

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.

phkahler3• 2 years ago

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

It's also 118 pounds for every person on earth. That seems really high for e-waste.

o-o-2• 2 years ago

I know a large retailer that sells electric screw drivers for €19 a piece. I also know from the chinese manufacturer's backwaters that it's deliberately designed to last for 12 minutes. That's roughly two years in the hand of an average non-professional, who will probably go back and buy another since it was so cheap.

These tools don't have a second-hand market. The expensive built-to-last ones do.

nolist_policy• 2 years ago

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).

o-o-2• 2 years ago

The company that deliberately destroys its own market hasn't been born yet. They will find ways to build customer retention.

imiric5• 2 years ago

This is awful on so many levels. These images should be postered around the headquarters of all major electronics manufacturers. They should be used in courts as prosecution evidence to force these companies to comply with repairability regulations, and force governments to enact stricter regulations and higher fines. They can start by making planned obsolescence illegal.

XorNot2• 2 years ago

[flagged]

imiric5• 2 years ago

[flagged]

dahart• 2 years ago

So what’s the core problem, and what’s your proposal to solve it?

Your logic seems questionable. The article mentions discarded components being recovered for their materials, e.g., copper & plastic. And when something is repaired, by definition some of the components are reused and not discarded. If it takes twice as long to wear out completely, then the replacement purchase rate drops to 50%. Why do you claim that’s not even partially addressing the core problem?

dang2• 2 years ago

Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Instead, please make your substantive points without swipes. For example, if you had posted just the second and third paragraphs of your comment here, it would have been fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

itishappy2• 2 years ago

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.

imiric5• 2 years ago

I'm sure that it's _part_ of the problem, no? What percentage of those tons of electronic waste do you think includes smartphones from the last 15 years? Do you think all of it is reused and recycled before it reaches these dump sites?

EDIT: Somewhere around 5 billion phones in 2022 alone[1].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63245150

lesuorac• 2 years ago

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.

mrguyorama2• 2 years ago

Have you not seen the pictures of giant tire dumps? They exist. They also occasionally catch fire and blot out the sun.

rraaffff• 2 years ago

There's a BBC documentary by Reggie Yates "A Week in a Toxic Waste Dump" from 2017, it is about the same Agbogbloshie Scrapyard in Accra:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p05dmmns/the-insider-r...

The BBC player only works in the UK, but you can easily find the episode on Youtube.

roenxi5• 2 years ago

I'd like to see an arial photo of this site, because these images paint an awful picture without actually showing us how big this dump is. 15,000 tons/annum in one area shouldn't be all that much in the grand scheme of things but the photos manage to make it look like this is some sort of boundless hellscape.

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.

throwgfgfd252• 2 years ago

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.

roenxi5• 2 years ago

There are a finite number of poor countries. At the rate wealth is being generated it is conceivable that they all get wealthy enough that the waste gets handled well.

And this stuff all started out in heavy metals deposits, it is already present underground somewhere. The only real question is how serious the effects on humans are with any method of disposal. It isn't at all clear there is a problem as long as it is buried fairly deep and not leeching into the water table.

_visgean• 2 years ago

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

deutschepost• 2 years ago

The Maps view is insane. It literally has a garbage fire going on during photography.

carapace• 2 years ago

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.

slow_typist3• 2 years ago

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.

slow_typist3• 2 years ago

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=de&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=agbo...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-...

slow_typist3• 2 years ago

And here some info on recent developments:

https://africanarguments.org/2022/07/agbogbloshie-a-year-aft...

wruza• 2 years ago

Scavenging e-waste for components feels so cyberpunk.

Sometime someone designed an IC, lithographed it on a high tech factory, soldered it onto a PCB and now it lies under your feet like billions of other rusty sharp parts, as if they were potato skins or plastic bags.

Just a few decades ago nations would start WW3 over this alien technology dump. Now they try find cheaper ways to sneak more waste into it.

ta9882• 2 years ago

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.

DJBunnies• 2 years ago

Ok I’ll bite, higher hashrate (bitcoin) means it’s more secure from attacks.

So it’s not being burned, it has a purpose here.

userbinator2• 2 years ago

Working conditions in mines have never been great. These are basically the mines of the future.

steviedotboston• 2 years ago

I've wondered if it would be better for electronics to be just thrown out in regular trash. I know they have some hazardous materials in them, but when spread out in low levels across landfills maybe its better than concentrating them in places like this...

agentultra9• 2 years ago

This is one reason I believe "right to repair" laws are so important. The environmental damage of producing the device is already done. Make it last as long as possible. Reduce, reuse... then recycle.

Re-using devices helps us also reduce the number of new devices needed... which is what probably scares the corporate oligarchy. If we're not buying new phones every couple of years how will the stock prices keep going up?

Never the less, the devices we make these days can last a long, long time. I've been repairing and maintaining iPhone 5's, 7's, and 8's that are no where near their end of life. The iPhone has a couple of small electrolytic capacitors which should have a useful life of at least 20 years. And can be replaced! The batteries and screens can replaced. These devices can last much longer than we give them credit for.

But tech companies have been struggling to make it illegal or difficult to repair for a long time. I've been seeing photojournalist projects such as this since the late 90s at least (longer perhaps). In North America we had a culture that valued repairing and building things that lasted. It's as good a time as any to push for this to return! Support policy makers that are pushing for right-to-repair and environmental protection!

And pick up a new hobby if you are able. Support your local tech geeks if you can!

echelon_musk• 2 years ago

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.

amelius2• 2 years ago

We need to reinvent capitalism.

(Why does my phone need to be upgraded every year, while capitalism is kept at version 0.1beta?)

yndoendo• 2 years ago

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.

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

Consumers aren't the issue. Consumer support for right to repair is broad. The issue is the government doesn't give a shit what consumers think the vast majority of the time, they're bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists.

AshamedCaptain• 2 years ago

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.

This would really not help much, unless there was some type of PC-like ABI driver standard that could ensure that devices could remain supported in operating systems without having to "support" each device individually. And even then...

Next step would be for the manufacturers to require publishing open documents for 3rd party support without having to sign a NDA.

I think this is even desirable in the PC world. I do not want AMD publishing drivers for Linux; I want AMD publishing absolutely free and complete specifications, possibly even a reference implementation, and mandated by law.

RF_Savage• 2 years ago

Repair and reuse would have kept the 30% appstore cut rolling in.

But that's about to change in Europe and USA due to recent rulings.

moffkalast5• 2 years ago

A large part of the problem is ARM itself and the ecosystem around it. Broadcom, Qualcomm and the rest of the closed source driver/firmware mafia who make it physically impossible for anyone to support their SoCs even if they wanted to.

RISC-V can't catch up soon enough.

latexr5• 2 years ago

Why would those companies CEOs want to hurt their golden package before exiting the industry?

Due to a sense of decency and humanity and a realisation they have more than they could ever spend and could be happy working to leave the world better than they found it?

Wow, I’m sorry, just got woozy there for a moment, must be all the fumes. Nice dream, though.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

amelius2• 2 years ago

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.

agentultra9• 2 years ago

So many devices are general purpose computers that are treated like a specialized device.

eg: modern games consoles. A Nintendo 3DS is an ARM11 board. You can run Linux on it. Most people don’t because it doesn’t look like a “computer.” And because they wouldn’t know how as it takes a very specific skill set to make it work.

They do get reused a lot because gamers of that era tend to value them… but a device like that could have tons of useful applications to extend its life.

A fold-up computer with built in wifi that runs on battery? Nice. With enough around you could run a low-power mesh network in an emergency to keep communication open between folks that are separated.

But such repurposing is far outside of most people’s reach. Especially when we’re trained to think of these things as products.

Phones are another one. An iPhone 5 could easily be repurposed into a firewall or other application to extend its usefulness and lifetime. It’s a general purpose computer crippled into being a product though.

hansvm• 2 years ago

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).

grishka• 2 years ago

(both not hosting the working versions and abusing things like their power over the signing keys to quickly deprecate old Android SDKs)

Android SDKs aren't getting deprecated. The SDK available on developer.android.com right now can still be used to build an app that runs on devices all the way down to Android 1.5. It's the developers who are dropping older Android versions by raising the minSDK in their apps.

Google Play does allow the developer to keep older app versions available for older Android versions. Again, most developers don't do that.

Google themselves support older Android versions for a very long time. Current versions of GSF and Google Play require Android 4.4, iirc. This came out more than 10 years ago.

DowagerDave• 2 years ago

yep - my old moto phone was fine, and I didn't add any new apps or desire new functionality, but performance got so bad over time to the point where it was unusable. There's really no attractive business model today in maintaining modest device usage over a long period of time.

burningChrome• 2 years ago

> 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.

ryandrake2• 2 years ago

It feels like the whole software ecosystem: operating systems, 1st party app and 3rd party app developers, are all conspiring to keep us on the "buy, buy, buy" treadmill. I've got a perfectly good iPhone 7 and quite a few of the apps are no longer even on the app store, and my existing ones are starting to get "upgrades" that put up full-screen modal dialogs telling me the app no longer works on my phone. They can't even let me keep the old working app installed!

Not to even mention my old O.G. iPad 1 and iPhone 4 which both work as perfectly as the day I bought them, except that none of the software works and the app store is a total ghost town. Software developers are mostly to blame for obsoleting perfectly working hardware.

nixosbestos2• 2 years ago

It's so upsetting. I keep my Pixel 3 as a spare phone. It's perfectly fine, I just used it for 5 days while my primary was on it's own adventure. Perfectly fine, other than it being completely unsupported by Qualcomm and Google, and thus unusable as a daily-driver since banking apps, wallet, etc no longer work, as I've had to move to LineageOS for any sort of updates.

tsimionescu• 2 years ago

The problem with software support is that it costs a lot to keep old versions around, and even to keep drivers for old hardware around. Even if there weren't perverse incentives to brick old phones to sell new hardware, it's very hard to imagine that any company would keep old software working for free like this. Windows, which did aim to keep back compact and support relatively old devices in its day was quite expensive for its time, and upgrades were not free either.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

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.

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

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...

agentultra9• 2 years ago

Recycling is definitely one area of engineering that is under appreciated and difficult.

The tech involved in recycling solar panels. Sheesh. Specialized equipment and patented processes. All to separate polymers from the metals and minerals. It’s currently more expensive than mining new material. The challenge will be to make it affordable enough that it makes sense.

But general electronic waste? I can’t even imagine. It sucks that instead of answering the challenge the world is collectively shrugging and dumping it in places like Ghana.

Update: Part of the recycling equation is not only designing electronics to be repaired and re-used but also designing them to be easier to recycle. In the solar panel field there are experimental designs that give new panels the same durability and life expectancy without the polymers which would reduce the cost of recycling them at end-of-life quite significantly.

Computing is... going in a different direction. Optimizing density at the component level makes for more power-efficient designs and some efficiency in the supply chain... but it makes recycling and repair waaaaaaaay harder. Not sure it's worth the effort tbh.

dailykoder• 2 years ago

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

dabber21• 2 years ago

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

support ended? too bad.

company is bankrupt? too bad.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

Fisher ocean owners are finding this out the hard way.

ClumsyPilot4• 2 years ago

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

IWeldMelons• 2 years ago

Chinesium devices are far more riendly in that respect, usually use standard cells.

eleveriven3• 2 years ago

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

sourcepluck4• 2 years ago

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.

agentultra9• 2 years ago

You can find jailbreaks for that generation of iPhone that are fairly reliable.

The problem with jailbreaks is that you’re in untrusted code territory. Treat them accordingly.

Project Sandcastle may have better support for 6 these days but you’d have to check. Last I checked the 7’s had the best support.

Good luck and have fun!

alfor• 2 years ago

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.

saturn8601• 2 years ago

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.

agentultra9• 2 years ago

Too true. Elsewhere in the comments we've been discussing the third R(ecycling) when it comes to general electronics. A tough problem... one that has so far been tackled by making it someone else's problem. Usually people who don't have the logistics and technology to handle it.

MrDrMcCoy• 2 years ago

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.

superultra• 2 years ago

I’m thankful I saw these pictures, if deeply unsettled.

We can’t (just) take an individualized approach to a solution, which is an artifact of the 80s and 90s when corporations and governments shifted responsibility to the individual to recycle a water bottle, for example.

It seems like the best solution is to impose a waste reduction fee that is built into price that pays for ewaste reduction. This could empower Ghanaians to build out this as a safer industry.

How much would that fee be? And who would spend the political capital to enact such a tariff? That’s the part that feels impossible.

naming_the_user3• 2 years ago

Counterpoint to most of the posts here - I don’t see this and think “wow we should stop using things”, I see this and think “wow, we need to sort out governance / fix poverty”.

A well run landfill looks nothing like this and these are in no way a foregone conclusion of someone throwing away an old iPhone 3 or whatever.

There is no more correlation here than with, say, Newton has the apple fall and then we cut to scenes of firebombing.

yunohn• 2 years ago

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.

naming_the_user3• 2 years ago

Sure, so let's make them pay for it, job done.

If I go to the loo and my water company decides it's cheaper to dump human faeces in the middle of the M1 motorway than to dispose of it properly, the solution isn't for me to stop going to the loo, it's to force my water company to stop doing that.

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

People should understand that proper clean electronic waste recycling does exist.

This story isn't so much about "we need to stop consuming new electronics" as it is "we need to ensure that electronic waste doesn't end up being dumped on random impoverished towns in Africa".

These guys are burning off the insulation from wires when there are simple cheap machines that automatically strip it all off. This is more a portrayal of extreme poverty than anything.

HermanMartinus2• 2 years ago

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

sweeter3• 2 years ago

the guy doesn't have any shoes, where are these tools going to come from?

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

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.

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

I cannot find any source that shows e-waste being primarily sent to third world countries. It looks like it mostly goes to India and China, if not processed locally.

And at least in India it doesn't look like a burning hell hole of toxic waste.[1]

[1]https://namoewaste.com/what-we-do/

randerson• 2 years ago

I'm speculating here, but its possibly because labor in the USA is too expensive to make this type of work economical, even if we have the tools. Most of the time I would repair things when they break but the hourly rate of repair shops is more expensive than a replacement. Overseas they have cheap labor but apparently not the tools. It seems like an opportunity for a charity to send some of these tools to Ghana along with each shipment of e-waste.

bastawhiz4• 2 years ago

Throwing the blame back on the poor countries getting exploited by corporate interest of rich western countries doing greenwashing

That's not what the person you're replying to said at all:

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

The point is that recycling isn't the problem, it's the companies who direct the waste. Nobody is blaming the third world countries for these problems. Holding these examples of terrible conditions up as evidence that recycling doesn't work just gives recycling a bad reputation rather than showing the irresponsibility of the companies that put the waste there in the first place. Neither the producers nor the recipients of the waste decided for it to be this way, it's the people in the middle.

lnsru2• 2 years ago

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.

pbronez2• 2 years ago

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.

I'd love to learn more about this. What's the state of the art? How do the economics work out?

For now, I take my end-of-life electronics to the local BestBuy. They have pretty good recycling standards, which include attempts to reuse & refurbish devices:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/recycling/recycle-guidelines/pc...

fransje26• 2 years ago

Heck they can’t get the damn local commuter train line to run according the schedule in apparently wealthy part of Germany.

They manage in neighboring Switzerland though.. Less greed and more pride for a job well done maybe?

concordDance3• 2 years ago

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.

The people who do the actual dumping tend to be poor, not the world running rich.

blitzar2• 2 years ago

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

metadat• 2 years ago

From a short-term capitalistic perspective, this is correct. The cost of the toxic materials generated from burning is externalized to all of us who are stuck on this rock.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

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.

concordDance3• 2 years ago

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.

Scoundreller3• 2 years ago

Iunno, I think the only way to do that would be to ban all textile imports in those places, which would make every non-textile worker poorer.

Lots of places try to ban 2nd hand imports, but I think that just leads to poor quality “new” imports from even cheaper countries that have industrialized textile manufacturing.

Unsure what it would take for them to become competitive textile producers but that’s what would work the best in the end.

Maybe I’ve taken too many (one) economics courses…

eleveriven3• 2 years ago

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

rrrix1• 2 years ago

https://maps.app.goo.gl/LS4xWeuewBqwUNuN9?g_st=com.google.ma...

That waterway is flowing directly into the ocean, and upstream from a fishing village.

sva_• 2 years ago

Maybe I shouldn't have eaten that tuna from Ghana

jl62• 2 years ago

"There’s a whole generation of young people that are building their society from e-waste work."

This is hard, dangerous, indecent work by any first world standard, but it's still work, it's still opportunity, and it's still an industry for people who otherwise might not have one. I don't wish to see this kind of pollution and suffering exist, but I also don't wish to take away something that despite its awfulness is still someone's livelihood. Ladders need bottom rungs. When they closed sweatshops in Bangladesh, the children had to resort to prostitution.

hcarvalhoalves• 2 years ago

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

jl62• 2 years ago

And yet coal wealth was tremendously beneficial for those communities. Kids-in-mines was ended by better labor regulation, not by cutting off the source of the wealth. Ghana has an amazing opportunity here. The world is literally shipping gold to their doorstep. There has got to be a solution that improves standards without cutting them out of the loop.

DrNosferatu• 2 years ago

The EU (and the US, and others for that matter) should increase the compulsory warranty from 2 years to 5 years.

Not only it would reduce e-waste, but it would also disincentivize the lowest-margin, sweat shop production.

ErikAugust• 2 years ago

I'm a software idiot, but why couldn't you do the Goodwill of Cloud Infrastructure? Build affordable cloud services out of "junk" electronics?

crote• 2 years ago

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.

blitzar2• 2 years ago

Total pollution of ownership would likely be lower with new hardware vs old when you take into account the higher power usage vs lower performance.

penguin_booze• 2 years ago

Dumping yards reminds me of a scene from the Office, where Dwight says (IIRC), "humans are the only animals capable of this".

lr1970• 2 years ago

User swappable batteries will extend the life of mobile devices big time. I am old enough to remember that you could easily pop any phone's back cover and swap the battery.

nfriedly5• 2 years ago

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.

adolph• 2 years ago

I think one of the exciting byproducts of future long term space travel is how it will change people's expectations of the material world. Currently humans generate a significant amount of material which does not have a downstream constituency, and thus is stored, sometimes in less aesthetically acceptable ways like the pictured scrapyard.

Since the topic of TFA is e-waste, many comments here promote "right to repair" legislation as a panacea. I don't think that "right to repair" addresses the root issue in a broad enough way to make a dent. It only addresses a subset of material, operates at hobby scale, and may mandate certain things, like socketed components, that make full-scale automated recycling more difficult.

Narishma• 2 years ago

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

BrandoElFollito• 2 years ago

I like to buy (some) used hardware when I have need to.

Either the ones that people sent back because they thought that it would be simple and was not (my Cisco home switch), or older tech that is completely fine for my needs.

My personal experience is that when electronics work for two weeks, they will work "forever" - I like someone else doing the test :)

Of course it depends on the hardware. It will be different for a switch and a UPS, or an SSD, ...

M95D2• 2 years ago

The article mentions repairing some of the electronics. There's even a photo with something that looks like a repair shop. I would buy vintage electronics and PC parts, but these guys are not selling on ebay. So, where do they sell them after they fix them?

Loughla2• 2 years ago

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

M95D2• 2 years ago

I was hoping that they sell them back internationally. I mean, how many '90s amplifiers can an african city buy?

t0bia_s6• 2 years ago

Yet, we made and buy crappy devices like Niimbot printers, that are not working without proprietary app that collect your data and asks for paying for using different, then default font. What a wonderful e-waste.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Ghana long been the example held up by reporting and exhibitions of the global e-waste problem (alongside Tanzania, and China). But one thing I've noticed in recent years' reports is a further twist: as countries' policies have started to shift (and their modernization/attitudes have grown perhaps), like in China for example, they are increasingly re-exporting the incoming e-waste further abroad to other Southeast Asian and African countries. The continued global migration of e-waste as it were. :/

hettygreen• 2 years ago

Here's the actual site on google earth:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/mjCvuMaUaZ3154eD9

There's a river that runs through the e-waste garbage dump, straight into the ocean less than 1 Mile away.

dools• 2 years ago

The only thing that can help this is an enormous export tarriff on eWaste unless it is shipped to a foreign processing centre run by a company that complies with the exporter's labour laws.

imoverclocked• 2 years ago

I just replaced an electric stove top unit because the old one had a burner that wouldn’t turn off. I still haven’t figured out what to do with the old unit; a local e-waste recycling group doesn’t want it, I don’t know anyone that wants a partially functioning stovetop, I don’t want to fix it myself… but I guess I can pay to bring it to the local landfill.

Anyone claiming that “right to repair” fixes any of this is missing the part where people don’t want to spend their lives repairing everything they have. Also, the new stovetop is far more energy efficient than the old one with is yet another balancing aspect of replacing old tech.

knowitnone3• 2 years ago

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?

squidgedcricket• 2 years ago

Inductive heating can be more efficient than resistive heating because less energy is lost to the environment.

bastawhiz4• 2 years ago

That's a nonsensical thing to say. An electric cooktop using heated rings is indisputably less efficient than an induction cooktop. It simply doesn't get all of its energy into the cookware.

What's the parent commenter supposed to do? Live without a stovetop because the old one can't be fixed?

kalessin• 2 years ago

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.

jabbany• 2 years ago

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"...

ordu• 2 years ago

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.

mdaniel• 2 years ago

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

travisporter• 2 years ago

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

nfriedly5• 2 years ago

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.

komali2• 2 years ago

Ewaste makes me super sad. I was in an electronics stores recently and found myself bored and even a little bit disgusted - new macbooks! new ipads! new laptops! new phones! Every year, new new new. But I have a lot more fun in the used electronics shop in my city (Guanghua digital plaza in Taipei). I find it a lot more fun to find good deals on parts punching above their weight for the price, e.g. if I find a used computer with a great processor in it that's selling for cheap because the specs are otherwise bad or whatever. And, in general, I find the thrill of the project much more fun than new new new. Can't wait to install linux on this used laptop, oooh a used pixel phone, the camera is still pretty good, maybe I can use this for a pet camera for my lizard, etc.

New phones especially I just don't understand anymore. My phone's been able to do everything I need it to do since like, 2016. New AI "feature," better processors, bigger screens, I don't get it. I have an excellent camera (fuji xt5) so better cameras don't excite me.

sweeter3• 2 years ago

This is just one of many ways us in the "first world" exploit the poverty of poorer nations. Wait until you all see what the labor conditions we solicit from these nations look like and all the countries we sell our literal garbage/waste to... knowing full well it will just be dumped in the ocean... but hey, "we didnt do it" y'know? they did. which in reality is just a shallow abdication of responsibility and everyone covering their eyes and ears and pretending like it doesn't exist

bibelo• 2 years ago

my 24" screen is a iiyama from 2008. Still working perfectly.

misiek08• 2 years ago

I have iPad 2 Retina. Screen still is great, battery allow for hours of playing, but it stays at iOS 12. Even Github doesn't work correctly there, because we moved onto super-extra-required-new-crazy-stuff in JS area. It's so trashy for me I gave it for 2-year-old on the trip and she pushed the home button so hard it's not working anymore, but iOS 12 allowed to just swipe from bottom, so device is still ok.

The only thing I can do with it is to throw it away, because Apple in Poland redirects to some garbage collecting company and even in US the device is worth 0$. I think materials and working Retina screen is worth much more than nothing. Great quality build, great hardware set, 64G memory. Much better than current models. But it still is a trash and waste for planet :( Sad.

eleveriven3• 2 years ago

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

nfriedly5• 2 years ago

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.

api• 2 years ago

International laws prohibit trafficking of non-functional e-waste containing toxic substances

I wonder if that makes the problem worse by making it hard to ship e-waste to places where it can be more efficiently recycled, so instead it ends up in places where corruption lets it in but there are no recycling facilities beyond "pickers?"

randlet• 2 years ago

"Emmanuel Akatire traveled about 500 miles from his home in Zorko, Ghana, to Accra, the nation’s capital, to find the only work he could — sifting through vast piles of discarded electronics to find valuable scrap metal. A week’s worth of painstaking, often dangerous work, earns him the equivalent of about 60 U.S. dollars."

I just finished The Grapes Of Wrath and this opening sentence feels like an odd futuristic parallel to that story.

commentor___555• 2 years ago

Isn't the elephant in the room that we are sending new sealed tech to EWaste?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/22/amazon-fa...

An e-waste dumping ground

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