It's pretty depressing. There's no kind of sensible plan to recovering useful stuff. Seeing a boy smashing polyester / polystyrene capacitors off an old PCB with a rock so he can sell them is just grim.
All the lead, tin, copper, heavy metals, leach into the soil and thus water supply. Wires and cables are burnt to get rid of the insulation and leave copper - these fires happen in the open air, with no kind of masking.
I love the idea of tiny, cheap, single purpose electronics. But often the quality is not great; and they're totally locked down. Manufacturers should learn that leaving some test pads on the boards, and putting a few documents on some websites, means that hackers will tinker, and that can lead to a lot of publicity.
I don't see why it is inherently unsustainable. There is nothing in the very nature of disposability that precludes a robust recycling path to close the matter loop. And nothing that precludes including the cost of that recycling in the price of the items that will eventually be recycled and/or the next things made with the material.
Trees dispose of their leaves, those rot and feed a chain of creatures and the material is recycled to the trees. This is something of an existence proof that such a system is possible.
I would agree we currently do a terrible job of approximating any such ideal.
I recently took an older Android tablet and turned it into a wall-mounted dashboard outside my bathroom.
With widgets, it shows my work email, personal email, the most recent tweet on my twitter feed, and my calendar for the next couple of days.
Additionally, I purchased a waterproof bluetooth speaker for the shower so I can turn on Pandora from the tablet each morning before I take a shower. The speaker has forward/pause/next buttons, so I can easily move past any song I don't like.
Overall, I've been pretty happy with the setup and it seems like a nice way to re purpose an older device I wouldn't necessarily carry around anymore.
Amen. We're planning a follow-up post about that issue. It's a real one for sure. If you can get a $40 Android tablet today, they'll be handed out for free within 5 years. Nobody is talking about the waste issue.
Hopefully they will be easy to re purpose.
This of course means that they will have to general enough to support more than one use case and also unlocked in such a way that reflashing the firmware is trivial.
Maybe like some service you link devices to and it gives you a list of all the various gadgets that it can turn a piece of hardware into.
I think it's going to take real design effort if we expect people to reuse these devices. I like your idea of the service helping you repurpose gadgets, or maybe even a deposit on your gadget -- send it in when you are done with it to recycle its rare components.
If a digital device only costs a couple of bucks, and a better/faster/cheaper one comes available a year later, the old one is going to get tossed. How many people repurposed their 2005 iPods, and those cost real money?
Culturally we are accustomed to just tossing aside the old, particularly with electronics. We're going to need significant cultural/technical/legal/design shifts to keep up with these changes. And quickly!
A large factor in this is the "lock-down" culture that has sprung up, and people buying into the bullshit that it's necessary for devices to be "secured" to be user friendly. I know it won't solve the cultural problems, but it's a complete non-starter if you can't even legally re-purpose your own hardware, or if it takes too much effort.
Considering that a Raspberry Pi's processor is the same/similar to an original iPhone (v1)'s processor, repurposing an old iPhone has a lot of advantages over shelling out $35 for a Pi.
Romo (http://romotive.com/meet-romo) is a cool example of repurposing old smartphones (unfortunately only works with iPhone 4 and above, but conceptually interesting)
Even the notion of hardware that is disposable is appalling and out of tune in the state of the world today. Please, don't focus on cheap production of items that are intended to have a short lifespan.
We need modular hardware. New camera came out and you really want a new camera? Sure, go ahead, upgrade the one you have on your iModularPhone.
Need crash-proof stuff? Sure, here is some of our flexible screen phones.
You see, durability, for the end user, could as well mean cheapness. Upgradeability, for the end user, could as well mean cheapness.
So, instead of dreaming the perfect product, or as a hacker have the need to improve and upgrade, please don't even for one second accept cheap, fragile items.
Limited features is ok (but possibility to upgrade is non-optional). Limited lifespan is never ok.
Modularity has several drawbacks. You need a connector on the host and a connector on the addon. This means you have added cost; not just component cost but in circuit board design. There are more solder connections, and thus more places for the gadget to fail. You've also made the device bigger and heavier.
In theory PCs are modular and upgradable. Except everything obsoletes every few years. Even things which sort of are the same (RAM) have changing features. (See, for example, DDR 2 vs DDR 3)
Baffling pop at America there. Many of these devices are designed outside the US, made outside the US, and sold outside the US.
Semi-disposable hardware is not merely a US problem.
I'm happy to shake my fist at the yanks - they use / waste an enormous amount of energy and should really start to focus on efficiency.
I don't see why disposableness would be intrinsically bad -- however if not dealt with by society, it will most likely lead to environmental damage. Personally I advocate large taxes on dangerous materials and chemicals, perhaps recoupable when recycled.
Modular hardware? Yes, please! Right now, I can upgrade the RAM, CPU, GPU and storage in my servers, desktop, and laptop. My phone? Not so much. And it wouldn't pain me so much, but for the fact that I'm missing out on things like NFC and low power Bluetooth. If I can get a software defined radio in a wristwatch (http://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2011/04/reprogramming-ez430...), then why can't I have one in a cell phone?
Unfortunately modularity goes against the interests of companies producing gadgets. They'd rather have you buy a full upgrade every 2 years than just change a few components once in a while.
You mean open and standardized system that is serviceable and mainable ... like PC? Sadly only the end users and developers benefit from the unwalled gardens.
A lot of the cheapness of these devices comes from the non-modulatity of them, basically the fact that the entire system is on one small chip (system-on-chip/SoC). You can't really have both this historic low-cost of items and expandability/modularity at the same time. Increasing the modularity means more interconnects, more complex case designs, etc, etc, which means much higher prices, not lower ones.
You could argue that all of this comes at a mucher higher shared long-term cost in terms of more garbage, global warming, etc, and you'd be right, but good luck offering a highly expandable, "green" device alongside the latest SoC-device out of China (selling at 10% of the lowest cost you could possibly produce the former device for) at your local Walmart. People are simply wired to make decisions that benefit themselves in the short term.
I'm really disappointed that the (clickbait?) tagline is about "disposable" hardware, when one might more positively look at the implications and impact of ubiqitous computing (sans disposable hardware). A $600 tablet device is a far different beast from a $60 or even a $6 tablet device. For example, how can a device improve when it's cheap for its sensors and UI to extend throughout a building (e.g. the Nest)?
A $600 mobile device is expensive enough that it's still "personal computing". The cheaper devices start to become "user interface of our environment".
Also, RIP Mark Weiser[1]. It's too bad he didn't live to see all this stuff coming to fruition.
They also came with a SIM card with £5 credit, on Orange. So in the UK, it's actually cheaper to buy one of these and do Orange Wednesdays if you and your friend plan to go to the cinema twice ever, than to buy full price tickets.
Well, the little black 'phone' in the article is actually a spy device. If you put a SIM in it to give it a number, you can then call it at any point, and it will silently answer and you can listen in to what's happening.
Which is really too bad. Make one with a button that calls a single number programmed in via the usb connection and it would be a sweet little communicator. Parents would love to strap one on their kid(s).
Couple this trend with the progress being made in 3d printers (eg, recent developments in 'printing' simple circuits and electronics) and one can easily see that the low-end consumer electronics market segment is due for a paradigm shift (cliche intended!).
Once consumer-grade 3d printers are ubiquitous, it would truly spell the end for brick and mortar retail for 'simple electronics,' since even printing out a cheap demo model at home will be much more cost effective than hopping in your SUV and guzzling a few $7 gallons to pick up a spatula with a built in thermometer.
Plus, we may see a resurgence in 'illicit' devices such as blue boxes back from the phreaking days. Some ne'er-do-wells will populate Thingiverse with designs for devices we could only dream of back in our mischievous youths and that could never be sold in a retail establishment.
This isn't a trend because it's not sustainable. The only reason these are cheap is because China artificially lowers their currency related to dollar, but with increasing pollution and social pressure, it's clear this can't go on forever.
Don't worry, US lawmakers will be "open for business" to prevent the outsourcing of waste - and we'll keep piling on the waste right here in the USA... just in "garbage towns" and the like.
A key factor will be disassociating highly personal information & configuration from the hardware. One subversive marketing point of the iPad/iPhone is how it ties so tight to a single user. With something disposable, cloud integration will become important, making the hardware fungible to the user.
If you use iCloud backup on your iPhone/iPad then you can set up a new iPhone/iPad quickly with all your personal data and settings without connecting to a computer or the old device. So you can already drop your hardware in a lake and not mind, as long as it's been backed up recently. (Which it probably hasn't been if you're vacationing at a lake.)
You can also remote-wipe lost hardware to prevent others from getting your personal data off of a discarded device.
Here's a clip form a programme about luxury goods. This is about the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78)
(http://videobam.com/rcEUM)
It's pretty depressing. There's no kind of sensible plan to recovering useful stuff. Seeing a boy smashing polyester / polystyrene capacitors off an old PCB with a rock so he can sell them is just grim.
All the lead, tin, copper, heavy metals, leach into the soil and thus water supply. Wires and cables are burnt to get rid of the insulation and leave copper - these fires happen in the open air, with no kind of masking.
I love the idea of tiny, cheap, single purpose electronics. But often the quality is not great; and they're totally locked down. Manufacturers should learn that leaving some test pads on the boards, and putting a few documents on some websites, means that hackers will tinker, and that can lead to a lot of publicity.