Nearly half a billion small tech items thrown away | Hacker News Reader

Nearly half a billion small tech items thrown away

bbc.com

47 pointsonemoresoop52 comments

The article touts the recyclability of many of these items, but recycling them is a pain. Until consumers can simply toss electronics in a curbside bin or easily drop off a handful for free at the local big box electronics store, it won't happen in the States. Even glass, which we all recognize as recyclable, isn't feasibly recyclable in many municipalities. Sure, you can save it, sort it, and take it to a special facility, but most people won't because it's a time consuming hassle.

Here in The Netherlands there's a recycling box next to my local (walking distance) convenience store. There are separate openings for cables, phones, chargers, etc. It works really well and it makes it effortless to toss in an unused cable or whatever into my shopping bag whenever I need to pick up some groceries.

But does it get recycled? We had similar in Australia for soft plastics, but classic startup style, lots of plastics were collected, none were recycled. The recycling part, well that was the hard problem that was being ignored right up until the company offering the recycling program collapsed.

> easily drop off a handful for free at the local big box electronics store

I believe this is required in the EU (electronics stores, with some exceptions for tiny ones etc., need to accept any electronic device up to a certain size whether sold there or not, and recycle it properly - I think the cost is ultimately paid by the seller or manufacturer through some chargeback scheme).

Our city no longer takes glass, it's kind of sad.

Same here and I completely agree. I'm somewhat surprised we also don't go the reusable route like Germany. Pick up a case of sodas or beers in glass bottles from the store to take home, then bring back a case of empties when you return. They get washed, refilled, and re-used. I feel like that should be overall cheaper than treating glass bottles as single use.

It is a slog trying to keep electronics out of the landfill. This year I have repaired:

Two switch joycons with failing internal flexible cables

A failing switch joycon battery

A dehumidifier that failed due to a faulty on/off switch

Two Casper lights with failing internal batteries

I do my best to research and buy stuff that is somewhat repairable but it is a slog and in many cases a leap of faith that the item be repairable and have parts you can hack or buy.

the worst are all the items these days that come with lithium batteries that aren't designed to be replaced. Sourcing high-quality replacements is a pain, getting the correct size requires taking the thing apart and measuring (and half the time these cheap items break during disassembly if they're ultrasonically welded or glued, even with good spudgers and a very experienced hand), and replacements sometimes need to come from AliExpress in larger quantities.

These items are so cheap that they're not worth repairing if you can't do it yourself, so opening up a shop fixing $10 milk frothers for 30 minutes of US labor rate wouldn't be worth it. They COULD use standard size li-ion cells, and indeed I try to buy flashlights that do (and have ironically had a couple of emitters die on >$50 flashlights that have this capability), but it's cheaper to get some crappy batteries down the street at the Shenzhen electronics market and just stuff those in there.

I really hope that the next move from the EU is something to address this. They're already on the case with phones ( https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/24/23771064/european-union-b... ) but so many other small electronics have this problem too. It's basically unavoidable at this point and I hate it.

Big shout-out to whoever required the Apple AirTags to have NORMAL COMMON-SIZE REPLACEABLE batteries. The Tile business model where they were sealed one-time-use electronics and you'd just trade them in was bad / lazy design. And yes; I know some tiles have replaceable batteries now, they still don't work as well as AirTags, and AirTags still don't fit well in wallets, and the other FindMy-compatible wallet-sized trackers don't have the Ultra-Wideband radio that enables the precise locating that makes AirTags so good.

Sourcing specialized and industrial components is a PITA.

The worst is when manufacturers use customized ASICs with no replacements. So either some entrepreneur is extracting them for resale or else you're stuck finding an identical donor.

AirTags don't work with older Duracell "child-proof" CR2032s because they're just slightly undersized. It's not the coating because I removed it with solvents and was able to manually press them into the contacts, but no about of bending the cover's "wing springs" would position them correctly. [0]

WASD V3 keyboards used a proprietary USB-C cable that is longer than commercially available.[1,2,3] I also asked support about replacing a USB-C receptacle but they ghosted me. Furthermore, they promised a Mac firmware update utility that never arrived.[4] My conclusion is that it's fly-by-night startup rather than a business. :[

I have an old Logitech MX Revolution (non-BT) that sellers still offer rechargeable batteries and pads for. Props to them for keeping classics alive.

0. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211670

1. https://support.wasdkeyboards.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3...

2. https://support.wasdkeyboards.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3...

3. https://support.wasdkeyboards.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3...

4. https://support.wasdkeyboards.com/hc/en-us/articles/36001851...

I don't know if it's a surprise or not, but the prevailing attitude of most people is to not understand how something works, and by extension, view items as unfixable and curable only with additional consumerism. Also, that landfill and recycling are magical blackholes that consume whatever is thrown into them with zero externalities.

Is it recycling that needs to be implemented or go ever deeper at the source and crack down on disposable, unfixable, ephemeral gadgets? Seems to be more of a greed rush problem, fix it in the future and make more money type of issue at the root of it. Recycling isn't necessarily not useful but attacking the wrong root cause of e-waste.

USB-C and replaceable batteries will solve a lot of it.

Gadgets are mostly just a battery, a computer, and an IO device.

With the battery and charging made reliable, the computer already near indestructible, and the plastic case pretty low-resource-use, all that can fail is the IO device, and if you're gonna replace that, it's not much better than a whole new device, since the rest is an empty box with a tiny PCB.

Real repairability would be nice, and we really need replaceable flash memory on phonelike stuff, but I think we're on the right track.

A bigger issue is the same problem with furniture: the devices don't wear out, but a better one comes out. This could be mostly solved with OTA firmware updates in everything, since modern devices have close to perfected the IO device.

I think the star trek utopia solution would be a set of standardized gadget modules. Then things could be fixed the same way we fixed stuff in the vacuum tube era.

I think 95% of gadgets ever made, from guitar tuners to washing machines, could have all the electronics replaced with one universal common standard board and one of a set of maybe 15 or so different modules.

Having spares of all of them would let you fix anything in minutes, for probably only a few extra dollars per product.

Of course it would do nothing to solve mechanical failures which in my experience are like, 10 or 20 times more common, but it would allow upgrading electronics for new features.

The top 5 accounted for ~70% of the items.

260 million disposable vapes

30 million LED, solar and decorative lights

26 million cables

10 million USB sticks

7 million cordless headphones

Maybe USB-C helps with the cables, I’m guessing many of those are failed cables though. In any case, I don’t think it will address disposable vapes or decorative lights.

Anyway, I dispute the 95% of gadgets number. I don’t think we can be too surprised disposable vapes ended up in the trash.

"disposable vapes" packs so much rage-worthy substance into so few characters. I really hope they ban the sale of these types of devices soon.

Disposable vapes are almost their own category. Like, wow, that's insane. It has nothing to do with durability or upgradability, people just.. like disposable ones.

Maybe it's the reduced sense of commitment. If you buy a reusable you're saying "Yep, I'm gonna be vaping long enough to justify this" and that might not be a nice thought for many users.

>USB-C and replaceable batteries will solve a lot of it.

Those weren't holding us back. What stops the tech companies from releasing a new model every year?

The manufacturer needs to have a higher level of responsibility for proper disposal. I can imagine a world where computer vision scans trash and charges manufacturers a cost for proper disposal. End users could get rewarded with coupons or rebates if they prove proper disposal. Perhaps the same scanning technology can check the trash at time of pickup and offer discounts to customers that properly sort their recycling.

Simpler to build it into the original cost. Manufactured goods are tomorrow's garbage. The price should reflect the cost of a sustainable system of disposal.

What if your competitors copycat your items for cheap and throw a bunch of them in the trash?

> Is it recycling that needs to be implemented or go ever deeper at the source and crack down on disposable, unfixable, ephemeral gadgets?

IMHO, the answer should be "crack down on disposable, unfixable, ephemeral gadgets" and quality decline in general. There are all kinds of apologetics defending disposablity and lack of repair-ability, but it's all bullshit to justify the enshittified status quo.

Appliances should be designed to last 25 years. Even if that means the up-front cost is more expensive, it's better for everyone except appliance salesmen than buying 5 appliances that only last 5 years each. Large manufactures should be required to provide a stable supply of repair parts. Any tech that can be made reusable should be made reusable. And I'm personally fine with an unwieldy government bureaucracy to bully our fine corporations and their executives into compliance. They've shown they need it.

Passing off symptoms and branch effects as root causes is what the media does on many topics.

The article mentions handheld portable vacuums. Even if a £30 vacuum is repairable, who is going to repair it? How can replacement parts be stocked when their sales will be 99% lower than sales of the original product?

Or when Dyson screws their batteries in and makes them part of the handle on the older models, then offers batteries that sensibly slide in on newer models as an upgrade? Meanwhile, all my Milwaukee M18 batteries sit in a drawer in the garage while the stupid Dyson one that is a different voltage charges and only lasts about 7 minutes (not an exaggeration) due to age / high power draw. You can get adapters for M18 batteries that work on Dyson V8 models, but not the newer stuff that has >18v batteries.

enter ebikes, stage right

I really dislike owning a dozen products that have the same damn rechargable lithium cells inside that I cannot move batteries between in any realistic or practical fashion. Even laptops and Teslas used to use 18650s! It's infuriating that there is zero incentive for companies to develop any kind of modular interoperable rechargeable battery under our current economic system, leaving us with only the trite solution of "just don't buy any modern electronic device, then".

Sounds like user error. Did you wash the Dyson's filter every week and leave it out 24 hours to air dry before reinsertion as advised in the manual? /j

The incentive is that soon it will be illegal to sell them.

I don’t think you can effectively regulate any of these things without changing the way society operates. Our economy, the whole world, is currently based on growth. We need to switch our society to one that isn’t based on constant growth. Then, there will be things we can do like regulate disposable things so that only very important disposable items are allowed, like medical supplies that need to be perfectly clean or whatever. Until we’re all on the same page of not wasting resources in the altar of growth, not much can be done to effectively fix this problem. Tech solutions like fancy recycling are like that Simpsons episode where they have a problem with some invasive animal, so they release an increasingly complex chain of invasive animals to kill the previous invasive animal, leading to releasing gorillas to eat snakes who will then die in the winter. You are just pushing the real problem down the road.

which society to do you mean?

Most of the world relies on a growth economy, so human society.

Well it seems disposable vapes are a pretty big part of the problem and you would think would be a pretty easy thing to regulate.

The only people more attracted to disposable vapes than teenagers are preschoolers. My husband and I have confiscated at least three so far that the kid has managed to find while we’re out walking or the worst, one on a playground. I guess at least it’s not needles, though two of them had little batteries that were frighteningly easy to get at.

I was just recently given a free disposable CBD vape with my latest dispensary order. They are quite popular in many more segments than "teenagers and preschoolers"

The comment was highlighting that their disposability and ubiquity leaves them too accessible to kids too young to know what they are or that they could be dangerous, not saying that only teenagers and preschoolers would be interested in them.

At any bar you go to just about every girl inside will be puffing on a vape (discretely or not) regardless of age.

Guys seem to generally prefer old school cigarettes outside. But many of them vape too.

Personally, I took up unfiltered hand rolled grits while in Europe for a bit (when in Rome…), and my throat is still recovering. I can certainly see the appeal of the vape. But as I don’t have any sort of anxious/depressive tendencies, nicotine is not something I have any desire to consume.

Not very true here in California where most people take the indoor smoking ban pretty seriously, and recently in France it seemed like regular cigarettes still outnumber vapes 20:1 or more. I haven't been to Japan in a couple of years, but regular cigarettes were still very popular there in 2019, and I don't recall seeing a single vape, though I wasn't specifically looking for them. Seems like a very regional thing -- I know that in the Midwestern USA for example, vaping is extremely popular across many demographics.

At least in Nürnberg and surrounds, vaping has taken over for people under 40. I’ve had colleagues vape on camera during informal meetings. The vapers I know (adults past college age) were all tobacco smokers before, so this is (hopefully) better for them. They definitely smell better!

Adults tend to use the refillable ones, and I usually can’t smell what they’re vaping, but I see high school age kids with the colorful, flavored disposable ones that my little kid seems to have a tropism for.

What straightedge CA bars are you hitting? I’ve been up and down from Crescent City to San Diego many times, and indoor vapers are everywhere.

how do you effectively shame people into doing the right thing here, as opposed to just letting them do the wrong thing at an alarming scale?

Shame is not a viable mechanism at scale (particularly across cultures). Particularly with the rise of extreme partisanship, shame lobbed at one group will be turned into an identity and used provactively (see e.g. "rolling coal").

you may be seeing a "guilt based society" trying to use a "shame based society" mores, here. we don't live in a shame based society, so it fails to do it's work pretty quickly ...

but then there's the rise in popularity of "just not giving a shit at all" and morality left the building long, long ago ...

I would shame the ones producing. Stuff like disposable vape should just not exists.

They are the one making a profit from this pollution ..

Replace "shame" with "regulate and fine" and I think we have a viable approach.

yeah, it seems people forgot the other two 'R's ... Reduce, Reuse.. then when you can't do that, recycle.

How is that possible? Companies are completely sociopathic. Whatever they say, they're only saying that to get people to buy their stuff.

Shame cannot work.

Under a capitalist system, you just need to force people to pay for the externalized cost so incentives align.

Arguably, any system of assessing and forcing people to pay for the assessed external costs is at odds with capitalism (it is arguably a form of central planning and interference with the free market).

Which is not to say that it isn't a good idea, and the minimum deviation necessary from capitalism to address externalities, but ideological capitalism/free-market purists tend to oppose it pretty strongly.

"Capitalism" does not mean "free market". It literally means that the profits go to investors (capital) instead of to the workers (labor). You can certainly have a capitalist system that does not have a free market, and you can certainly have a free market system that is not capitalism.

You mean shame the producers?

In my area there are two options to recycle tech: drive across town and hope the location is actually open or wait for one of the two times there’s a large drop off event in the area that takes over an hour of waiting in line. Hoping my next city has it figured out better, but it’s the US so my hopes are not high.

Rather than spew a giant post, here's a list of mitigations and specific examples I do to reduce e-waste and excessive spending: https://pastebin.com/uksGTRq5

corporations should be billed for producing this waste.

Scaremongering. Small tech items are a small fraction of what the average person throws away

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