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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

How many of us here who frequent these forums are guilty of being irresponsible with digital waste/footprint when it comes to things like this?

The amount of different variations of Raspberry Pi's I've been collecting over the years for no good reason, all doing nothing. And I don't even consider myself part of the upper echelon/extremists when it comes to this.

With that said, I wonder when we will get Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (with wireless/Bluetooth capabilites)

> The unique dual-core, dual-architecture capability of RP2350 provides a pair of industry-standard Arm Cortex-M33 cores, and a pair of open-hardware Hazard3 RISC-V cores, selectable in software or by programming the on-chip OTP memory.

Kind of interesting... Two architectures in one chip? https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/

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Let’s do some math to see if this qualifies as something to worry about. They say they’ve sold 4 million Picos. The packaging can get recycled, but let’s just assume every single Pico ends up in a landfill. How big a problem is that?

Datasheets say they’re 21x51mm. Looks like they’re on the order of 5mm deep. So 5.35mL per Pico.

Four million of these would be 5659 gallons of Picos, 756 cubic feet.

So you could take the e-waste of every Pico sold to date, and put it in a single 9.1ft cube in your garage.

I’d argue that this doesn’t qualify as something we shouldn’t spend time worrying about. There’s probably at least one Pico, maybe running a sign at some EPA office, doing more good for the environment than all the waste from all of them together is causing harm.

The packaging and production waste is probably the bigger issue considering the efficacy of recycling and the knowledge that all the waste of production winds up in the Pacific ocean.

Sounds like effort is best spent on improving those processes, then, rather than worrying about personal consumption that doesn’t move the needle.

Yes and no. On the one hand, fixing those processes is a much bigger impact, you're 100% correct. But on the other hand, I as an individual can do exactly nothing to affect it. While my personal environmental impact is much smaller, I actually can control it. So both are valuable to think about in different ways.

Or do both? No one is telling you not to buy something you will use, but the OP was commenting about boards they purchased and never or rarely used. Being slightly more considerate about your use is free, and if more people do it, maybe it will move the needle a point or two.

If you don’t have a car you can probably waste a couple thousands of these without feeling too bad about it.

> How many of us here who frequent these forums are guilty of being irresponsible with digital waste/footprint when it comes to things like this?

Literally everyone in the developed world is guilty of being irresponsible with digital waste/footprint.

If you already have any kids at all (for example), there's nothing you can do to reduce your damage to the earth. Go ahead and as many raspberry pis as will fit in your junk drawer and don't give it a second thought.

If you ever get on a plane for vacation, same story. Raspberry Pi is a rounding error.

If you buy a new phone every few years, again same story.

> If you already have any kids at all (for example), there's nothing you can do to reduce your damage to the earth

This is a misanthropic perspective, we should have no kids and die out to reduce ‘damage to the earth’. Best environmentalist is a mass murderer. Worst climate criminal is a sperm donor.

But if you look at the physical world, Earth already had 6 mass extinction events, asteroids, supervolcanoes, etc. they killed basically everything, and life bounces back. There will be more. Our efforts are unimpressive in comparison. In absolute, it doesn’t matter.

From a humanist view, ‘Damage to the earth’ is damage to its ability to support human life. That’s the perspective that makes sense to me.

One of the requirements is that civilisation continues.

And the best contribution is to bring up a well adjusted, kind and capable individual, and for them to do the same.

If lump together environmental impact of children and parents, then if your bloodline continues forever your evrironmental impact is infinite. This creative accounting leads to absurd conclusions

He didn't say that one shouldn't have kids due to environmental impact, he was just putting it in perspective. The point was that if you have kids, and if you don't worry about the environmental impact they cause, then you shouldn't worry about the much smaller impact of a Raspberry Pi either.

There's no need to keep the population growing as it is though. That's unsustainable. It's not all or nothing: make as many kids as possible or go extinct. There's a middle road.

It would be great if humanity would shrink to 1 or 2 billion. More than enough. Resources wouldn't be as scarce, housing wouldn't be a problem. Much less need for wars as most of those are driven by resource and land scarcity. It would be much easier to reach an equilibrium with nature.

The problem is that a high birth rate is viewed as a virtue due to religious and short-term budget concerns (more people to pay for pensions etc). While it's true that a shrinking humanity would cause temporary issues, it would only be for a while until it stabilises.

I for one am really happy with my decision of not having any kids.

I don't frown on people with 1 or 2 kids but I do on those with huge families. But that's just me, they are free to do so of course.

That's not what I said at all!

I said if you have kids don't hand wring over your environmental impact. It's like thinking that if you cry at the beach you're making the ocean saltier.

If you have kids you're betting that, "the best contribution is to bring up a well adjusted, kind and capable individual, and for them to do the same."

It's a decent bet for sure.

> How many of us here who frequent these forums are guilty of being irresponsible with digital waste/footprint when it comes to things like this?

Did you consider used market? I was stupid enough to not take the opportunity to make some good money when even ancient ones were unobtanium and overpriced everywhere, but recently managed to sell all my older ones at a decent price, so no direct waste was produced.

What concerns me more about this Pico however is the signed boot locking feature that if not reversible could lock a Pico to the original program forever, so an used one couldn't be repurposed for anything else even if a non malicious user wanted to reflash it entirely without reading the original content. I'm not sure about that so I'd welcome more information on the subject: could signed boot locking be reversed with a complete flash erase?

The used market is really good now from a buyers perspective. I'm working on a few projects and wanted a few extra pi's. Managed to grab a few used ones from people that have sidelined their projects. Good condition. Basically paid retail price but also got 7inch touch screens with each pi for free.

As tempting as a new toy may be, we are always welcome to put off getting new ones until we have made good use of the old ones. That is especially true of microcontrollers and development boards, where the need to upgrade is dictated by the needs of the project. This isn't like a computer or mobile device where anything from updates to end-user applications or the operating system will artificially obsolete them.

Donate the dusty ones to the nearest hacker/makerspace?

It isn't necessary to hoard parts that just sit around and do nothing. It is possible to sell or give them to others who do have a use for them.

The plastic waste you produce in a day is way worse than a few PCBs you never use. Don't worry about it.

Semiconductor fabrication is nasty. It's way worse than most plastic production. Even the board substrate itself is probably the most toxic kind of plastic out there (other than maybe styrene feed stock) before its cured and being a composite it decomposes the slowest. It's much much worse than most household waste.

There are bigger things that produce way more waste though. Lots of vehicles (especially boats) have huge fiberglass composite components for example.

disposable ecigs...

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