Addressing the global problem
Recapping on E-waste:
- Personal electronics companies build planned obsolescence and irrepairibility into their products to maximize profit
- This leads to consumers having to buy more electronics than they need
Why does the world produce so much e-waste? Because of planned obsolescence.
Why does planned obsolescence exist? Because corporations are profit-hungry.
Why are corporations profit-hungry? Because of capitalism.
The root cause of e-waste is planned obsolescence. The root cause of planned obsolescence is capitalism. Therefore,
The root cause of e-waste is capitalism.
The free market is in direct conflict with "buy what you need."
Companies fundamentally have to make a profit to stay alive.
After securing financial stability, companies are fundamentally driven to make a profit. Even if the board wants to act altruistically, they must consider the wants of their shareholders.
And it is not just corporations who are profit hungry. Countries love to see their GDP rise, and governments take action to "promote economic growth." Fundamentally, what is economic growth? Economic growth is increasing the amount of goods and services bought and sold.
Waste reduction is directly at odds with "increase the amount of goods produced."
If you want to stay committed to reducing waste, beware of the pitfalls of capitalism.
The problem of e-waste is not just capitalism and planned obsolescence. It's also consumerist culture. 3 years ago, if you had an iPhone 7, you would be the cool kid in my class. Today, if you have an iPhone 7, you would be ostracized as a boomer.
A problem created by capitalism requires a solution through capitalism
The root cause of electronic waste, the production of 70% of the world's toxic waste is largely caused by human behaviour, culture, and first world problems. This is what makes this problem interesting to me. It requires adifferent type of innovation. A better, more durable phone may be a solution to planned-obscolescence, but against the backdrop of a culture that rewards continuous purchasing of new and improved products, it is useless.
Instead, in order to create a company to solve this problem, a a Tesla-esque innovation is required—one that doesn't just shake the industry, but shapes the social constructs around electric cars.
Sidenote
How Tesla changed the game for electric cars
Ok, I think it's worth talking about this because there are some interesting parallels between the pre-Tesla landscape for electric cars and the current situation of e-waste.
In the early 2000s, electric cars were terrible. The average ones had a tenth of the range as gasoline cars [1], they looked ugly, and they were ubiquitously considered uncool.
It's worth emphasizing how uncool they were. The 1970s Arab oil crisis was the one time that interest in electric cars had any resurgence since their loss against gasoline cars to take over the market more than a century ago. One of the only EVs that made decent traction in the US at this time was the Citicar, which sold a little more than 2000 units in total. It was the most uncool a vehicle can be: it had the speed of 30-50 mph, a range of 40 miles, and it literally looks like a giant cheese wedge:
When Tesla came out with their first vehicle, the Roadster, in 2008, it had a respectable range of travelling 393 km on a single charge. It had the 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) acceleration of 3.7 seconds, which was comparable to some of the best gasoline cars. This was the first time people realized that electric cars could be good.
In the decade after that, Tesla and Elon Musk relentlessly continued their marketing strategy, further pushing people's perceptions of what an electric car can be.
Tesla's impact on the auto industry wasn't just in making a better electric car. Tesla made it cool to own an electric car, leading to a cascade of side effects such as big gas car companies like Ford investing into their own development of electric cars and GM committing to "bringing the world to an all-electric future."
Anyone in the consumer electronics business will tell you that people buy phones for their cool factor, not for price, performance, or practicality. To build a company to address the e-waste requires doing what Elon Musk did for sustainable transport - changing the perception around what type of phone is sexy. Changing the norm from "the latest and greatest is cool" to, "I can repair my own electronics. I owned this phone for 10 years. That is cool."
There has been progress made in this front, such as a recent startup Framework which makes completely repairable, upgradabe, and high-performance laptops.
The team over at Framework has managed to not just create a laptop that is easily repairable and upgradable, but it's also a thin, gorgeous, performant laptop.
— Linus Tech Tips
Footnotes
[1] An average EV of the era had a range of 30-50 miles, while the median gas car as a range of slightly above 400 miles.