[HN Gopher] An e-waste dumping ground
___________________________________________________________________
An e-waste dumping ground
Author : andsoitis
Score : 205 points
Date : 2024-10-07 12:30 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This is really heartbreaking to see and dystopian.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| It is literally only there. This problem exists because the
| governments of these places allow it to happen. The reason
| it doesn't happen here is because we have strong
| environmental regulations _here_.
| ta988 wrote:
| For now
| mrguyorama wrote:
| "Strong environmental regulations" would make it
| impossible to just ship to someone without.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Solve the problem at whatever junction that is exposed for
| a solution is my point. Being outraged about stuff seems to
| not magically solve problems. Rather it often has a similar
| effect as ruminating about problems when being depressed.
| It often enforces the idea that the problem is somehow
| unsolvable.
|
| Not saying outrage doesn't have a place. Just that other
| means might be more efficient.
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| > movement [X] was hijacked to care about a single aspect
| of [Y]
|
| I think this is a symptom of a larger issue that has
| nothing to do with environmentalism. Global cultural
| consciousness is getting more centralized. There isn't as
| much room on any particular agenda for multiple facets of
| any one issue when everything is being bottle necked
| through a much more centralized cultural sphere.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| What is this thing that is both heartbreaking but without any
| reason for outrage? Like getting rejected from the school
| dance?
| gosub100 wrote:
| Trillion-dollar companies that produce this crap are sitting
| back in their skyscrapers saying "not our problem, something-
| something _the market_ "
| carlgreene wrote:
| 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
| paulcole wrote:
| > 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.
| maeil wrote:
| 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.
| paulcole wrote:
| > It's very easy to take a nihilist view that nothing
| matters, as it completely absolves oneself of any potential
| responsibility whatsoever
|
| No! I actually do take personal responsibility by:
|
| * Living in a small apartment in a dense city
|
| * Never having driven a car - I never even learned to drive
|
| * Never flying in an airplane - last flight was 10+ years
| ago and have no plans to fly again
|
| * Eating a plant-based diet
|
| * Not ever having kids
|
| But I will concede that none of those things matter.
|
| > 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.
|
| That is neat! People in general will not change their
| behavior.
| yowzadave wrote:
| I don't think GP is saying nothing matters, they are
| objecting to the idea that the way to make systemic change
| happen is to convince individuals to change personal
| behaviors through moral persuasion.
|
| We have, however, had some success at taking collective
| action; compare trying to convince individuals to make a
| moral decision not to use disposable technologies with a
| regulation that requires manufacturers to make their
| products repairable/recyclable/etc.
| delfinom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| andsoitis wrote:
| See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste_in_Africa
| artursapek wrote:
| This is why the "MKBHD" etc type youtubers who worship "new
| tech" and do unboxing videos have always bothered me.
| y-curious wrote:
| 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.
| artursapek wrote:
| I live in the US. Those are insane. I can't believe how
| quickly they became normal. Not only will they definitely
| cause cancer, but they are a cancer on the planet too. And
| they're marketed like toys.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| From a health and harm reduction perspective they are
| probably saving lives by replacing cigarette smoke which
| is much more harmful. But I agree that from an
| environmental perspective they are much worse. Perfectly
| good Li-ion are thrown in the trash which is insane.
|
| I don't understand why people buy these. I don't vape,
| but it is my understanding that you can get reusable
| vapes with cartridges that are very easy to replace, and
| which are probably more enjoyable to use.
| artursapek wrote:
| We have no idea how their health effects compare to
| cigarettes, they're too new.
|
| People should just smoke pure tobacco (pipes, cigars) but
| those are too inconvenient.
| kortex wrote:
| There's no world in which atomized nicotine,
| glycol/glycerin, and some flavors, is comparable, let
| alone worse, than inhaling smoldering tobacco leaves.
| Even the purest, organic tobacco made from the nicest
| leaves lovingly collected by happy family farmers, is
| still gonna give you cancer if you burn it and inhale the
| smoke. That's just chemistry.
|
| The only exception is if the vape juice contains
| something it "shouldn't", like the vitamin E acetate
| debacle, but if you put the same wrong things in tobacco,
| you get the same issue. This problem is avoided entirely
| with a verified source of ingredients.
|
| Partial combustion products will always contain, at
| minimum, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a verified
| carcinogen. The hotter the conditions, the more complex
| the precursors, and the more incomplete the reaction is,
| the more nasty junk you will create. Vaping might or
| might not be bad, but the chemistries of smoking includes
| the full set of chemistries of vaping, and then way way
| more, due to the incomplete combustion of the much larger
| molecules in plant matter.
|
| Bottom line: probably don't put the volatile reaction
| products of substances heated above 100degC into your
| lungs: tobacco smoke, vape, campfire smoke, car exhaust,
| brake dust, etc. But some reactants are far worse than
| others.
| kergonath wrote:
| > From a health and harm reduction perspective they are
| probably saving lives by replacing cigarette smoke which
| is much more harmful.
|
| There is some evidence that they are used by people who
| never smoked, though. The smoking reduction seems like a
| convenient excuse for these companies. In actual fact
| smokers or former-smokers is a limited and dwindling
| market. They want to expand aggressively, notably in
| younger populations.
| dml2135 wrote:
| As someone who recently quit vaping I can shed some
| light.
|
| My understanding is that the FDA recently banned flavored
| vapes, however the wording of the rule made some
| reference to the ban being for "cartridge-based" vapes,
| presumably to target Juul over roll-your-own-vape-juice
| type systems.
|
| This lead to a loophole where the disposable vapes, being
| disposable and not cartridge based, can be flavored.
| y-curious wrote:
| I bet you, with the advent of the FDA banning flavored
| products, we will see the same for form factors. The
| pleasant-looking disposable vapes are neon colors and
| look like toys, just like you said.
| userbinator wrote:
| A few videos have already been made about harvesting those
| for free rechargeable batteries.
| runjake wrote:
| I only know about these from seeing them on the ground, in
| the streets, and in bushes everywhere.
| piva00 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bubaumba wrote:
| 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.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I would rather call this: the receiving end of planned
| obsolescence.
|
| The other end is... you.
| exitb wrote:
| 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.
| tivert wrote:
| > 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.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| You can't throw things away. You can only move them somewhere
| else.
| riskable wrote:
| Imbesi's Law of the Conservation of Filth: In order for
| something to become clean, something else must become dirty.
| tomrod wrote:
| Reminds me of entropy.
| schrectacular wrote:
| 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.
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| 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...
| FredPret wrote:
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Not to nitpick since it's still in the same magnitude, but
| I think it's more like 25.5 lbs
|
| 118,000,000,000 / 4,640,000,000 = 25.4310344828
| o-o- wrote:
| I know a large retailer that sells electric screw drivers for
| EUR19 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 wrote:
| I don't know, I recently saw electric drills for EUR29 at Aldi
| and to my surprise they used brushless motors! They will
| probably last an eternity for hobbyist (minus the batteries).
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| You have looked at a problem and proposed a bunch of completely
| irrelevant solutions.
|
| What happens when something is repaired? Components are
| replaced and discarded. What happens eventually when the device
| wears out? It is is discarded.
|
| If we did _everything_ you listed, it wouldn 't even
| appreciably change the volume of material discarded, since
| eventually all manufactured items wear out.
|
| And of course, what is missing in this little diatribe? _Any
| solution to the question of what to do with discarded
| electronics_. You aren 't solving the core problem.
| imiric wrote:
| /sigh Typical pedantic contrarian HN response...
|
| Look, I'm not saying that this would solve all of these
| problems. I don't even claim to have the expertise to propose
| potential solutions. But speaking as a consumer, focusing on
| the source of what causes them might be a good place to
| start.
|
| But I'm sure that your expertise and infinite wisdom must be
| able to produce better ideas to fix this, which I'm eager to
| hear.
| kergonath wrote:
| > /sigh Typical pedantic contrarian HN response
|
| It is not pedantic or contrarian, though. The points they
| are making are real issues.
|
| The right to repair is important, but from an environmental
| point of view it is not that relevant. Besides, what the
| current demographic and economic trajectory of the world,
| huge populations are accessing the middle classes, with the
| associated increase in consumption. Even with perfect
| repairability (which does not solve the issue of discarded
| parts or plain broken devices, the amount of which is
| proportional to the number of devices in use), things
| physically cannot get better. The best lever we have right
| now is to reduce consumption. It's about as credible as
| perfect repairability, but is much more effective. "Do we
| really need these 6 phones, 3 computers, 2 cars, and
| microprocessors in every light bulb" is a more pressing
| question than "can I fix my phone with a torx screwdriver"?
|
| Repairability is a good thing, but it is only part of the
| battle, and not the most critical.
| imiric wrote:
| > The right to repair is important, but from an
| environmental point of view it is not that relevant.
|
| The quote was "completely irrelevant". How is that not
| contrarianism?
|
| > The best lever we have right now is to reduce
| consumption.
|
| Ah, consumerism. And what magical lever do we have to
| reduce that?
| kergonath wrote:
| > The quote was "completely irrelevant". How is that not
| contrarianism?
|
| That was a slight hyperbole. It is not "completely
| irrelevant", merely irrelevant. Contrarianism implies bad
| faith and knee-jerk reactions. They provided arguments,
| which you are free to debate or question.
|
| > Ah, consumerism. And what magical lever do we have to
| reduce that?
|
| Well, realistically? None. Not before it gets
| significantly worse anyway. It's still more realistic
| than getting out of this hole by repairing stuff. The
| orders of magnitude are just not there.
|
| Again, repairing devices is a good thing. But it's not a
| panacea and won't solve that specific problem.
| dahart wrote:
| 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?
| itishappy wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| 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
| itishappy wrote:
| It sure sounds right to me too, but I'm looking at the
| photos and I don't see _any_ phones. Actually, I don 't see
| much I'd consider using, even if it were still working.
|
| That's a problem too, but it's different from what you're
| describing.
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Have you not seen the pictures of giant tire dumps? They
| exist. They also occasionally catch fire and blot out the
| sun.
| rraaffff wrote:
| 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.
| farceSpherule wrote:
| Who cares... Been happening for decades...
| blitzar wrote:
| Trickle down economics at its finest.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| > 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| > There are a finite number of poor countries.
|
| This is a bit of an imaginary solution to the problem, is
| it not? And there will always be poor_er_ countries, which
| is the thrust of my point.
|
| The economic incentive does not go away. Not least because
| it is clearly _already_ cheaper to float it away on a huge
| boat than bury it where it is used.
|
| One problem is land cost: it's extremely difficult to
| safely build new houses on top of landfill. But that
| doesn't explain everything, does it? After all the USA has
| plenty of room to bury all its consumer waste. Why is it
| exporting it?
|
| > And this stuff all started out in heavy metals deposits,
| it is already present underground somewhere.
|
| It does not start out all in one place, though. It starts
| out in small, dispersed concentrations of heavy metals, and
| ends up all in a few giant landfills in poorer countries.
| It's not clear what the risk is, but the lack of clarity
| doesn't mean there's no risk.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
|
| This waste was dumped. The fact that poor people moved to
| the dump to make a living scavenging is a secondary
| phenomenon. Without them it still would have been dumped.
| _visgean wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The Maps view is insane. It literally has a garbage fire
| going on during photography.
| carapace wrote:
| 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_typist wrote:
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| 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.
| ta988 wrote:
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| Working conditions in mines have never been great. These are
| basically the mines of the future.
| steviedotboston wrote:
| 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...
| agentultra wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| amelius wrote:
| We need to reinvent capitalism.
|
| (Why does my phone need to be upgraded every year, while
| capitalism is kept at version 0.1beta?)
| yndoendo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nickff wrote:
| Consumer support for right to repair is broad, so long as
| it comes at no cost to them. People don't want to pay to
| fix things, and they don't want to accept any reduction in
| performance either.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Why would you pay same price for repairing a shoes when
| you can get a new one for similar price?
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > 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.
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
| agentultra wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > (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 wrote:
| 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.
| superultra wrote:
| 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_user wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_user wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| HermanMartinus wrote:
| 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
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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/
| devsda wrote:
| > Having long invaded Asia (Russia, India, China, etc.),
| e-waste from Europe and the United States is arriving in
| extensive quantities in the ports of West African countries
| such as Ghana, in violation of international treaties.
|
| This is from the first link[1] in the npr article. It
| doesn't say that it is the primary destination but does say
| that it is high.
|
| 1. https://www.fondationcarmignac.com/en/ANAS-AREMEYAW-
| ANAS-MUN...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| "extensive quantities" is a meaningless term.
|
| If we use the numbers from the article (250k tons) and
| from the site your provided (62 million tons), "extensive
| quantities" is 0.4% of e-waste.
| lnsru wrote:
| 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.
| pbronez wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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?
| blitzar wrote:
| These guys are cheaper than the simple cheap machines that
| automatically strip insulation from wires.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| 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.
| rrrix1 wrote:
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| This rhetoric is outdated by more than 200 years, when kids
| worked at coal mines in 18th century Britain.
| jl6 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Dumping yards reminds me of a scene from the Office, where Dwight
| says (IIRC), "humans are the only animals capable of this".
| lr1970 wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| 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.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| 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, ...
| M95D wrote:
| 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?
| t0bia_s wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. :/
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