Stop shipping hardware products that are only “beautifully designed”
wellsriley.com
wellsriley.com
Pray tell though, what affordable semi-conductor material is there out there to replace silicon, that is readily recyclable and achieves the same target?
I fear, too many people want their cake and to eat it too - you want the latest and greatest capabilities (want, not need), but you want them to make it in a way which it will not function, so that you can feel good about it. ("You," being the standard consumer, not any one person in particular.)
PCBs are NOT made of silicon. Integrated circuits are (but not their packages). PCBs are usually FR-4 material:
Apple has gone a long way to making parts that are more "pure", where, for instance, the chassis of new computers is milled from a solid piece of metal that, once removed, can be shredded and reformed with no more difficulty than a drink can. The same goes, in principle, for the glass.
The plastics in most computers are made from an exotic blend of materials and are not easily reprocessed.
What we need more than cardboard computers is standards on how to manufacture products so they can be unmanufactured in the end and rebuilt into other things. The goal here is for 0% loss in the recovery cycle. Anything below 100% is not, by definition, sustainable.
If that sounds impossible, consider that the natural ecosystem in which we all live tends towards a 100% recycling rate. There are very few natural byproducts that do not have a recovery path. For instance, most trees produce enormous amounts of "garbage" in the form of leaves but these are almost immediately recycled.
Given that the natural world has been doing this for literally billions of years, there is much to be learned.
A great book on this subject is Cradle to Cradle (http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm) which proposes radically re-thinking our industrial cycle.
The recycling process becomes extremely complicated when the composition of the materials is non-uniform. The common worst offender in this regard is plastic bottles with several different types of plastic layered together. The opposite is a glass bottle with a metal cap.
Provided you can smash and pulverize a product into sufficiently fine pieces you can separate it by material.
An iPhone lasts a long time, and the author should be comforted that not everyone can afford to buy a new one every time Apple bumps the version, naturally limiting Apple's ability to fill landfills with barely-used iPhones by launching new product features.
The net footprint of a big company like Apple is surely complicated, as there are many ways to offset one's impact. I'm no expert, but Apple has a whole website on their strategy (http://www.apple.com/environment/) that shows they are making an effort, perhaps a large one.
One thing I do know is that iPhones and other Apple products have high resale value, that there's an industry thriving on selling replacement screens, batteries etc.
This wouldn't be the case if most people considered these devices crap and obsolete the day a new product was introduced.
From my experience, people keep their Apple products for many years, often giving them to other family members when they upgrade themselves. If they weren't built to last, this would be impossible to do.
The real landfill fillers are the crappy plastic phones that get scratced and damaged.
I think your mental timescale here is a bit too small. "Built to last" means what? 10 years, optimistically. That means that in 10 years, those products will still be sitting in a landfill...for hundreds of millions of years.
There are choices that hardware designers can make that will help mitigate this at least to some extent, but unfortunately, it appears as if we are moving further and further away from this (the glass glued to the display being one example).
Not true. Worst case, they end up in a museum when an archaeologist finds them in a couple thousand (not million) years.
Remember, of the three things we're all supposed to be doing, recycling is the absolute worst.
Followed by reuse, then reduce.
It could be argued that making a device reusable is actually better than making it recyclable.
The consumers of this world seem to be caught up in this "recycle it" craze. Somehow it's fine to churn through 30 plastic water bottles a week, because they are going in the recycling.
In reality, the water bottles should be gone entirely.
I'm not saying there is a problem with having items that are reusable (on the contrary, its great. The longer the lifecycle of an object, the less overall objects we produce). I'm just saying that while we are trying to limit the amount of "product" that is produced (the net effect of reusing and recycling), we also need to keep an eye on how to get rid of all this "product" once we are done with it.
Besides recycling is just another form of reusing, is it not?
We're not "limited" to doing any of those three things. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is all about choices. What we "should" be doing. What's "best". We should "aim" to reuse rather than recycle.
> Besides recycling is just another form of reusing, is it not?
Recycling uses exponentially more energy, especially when you're talking about glass and aluminum.
I don't see why this is a XOR situation. Ideally, we would be reducing production, and what we do produce would be readily reusable AND (eventually, when we have gotten past the useful lifecycle of an object, and every object has one) recyclable.
Making long-lasting, more expensive products certainly decreases the amount of devices that end up in landfills.
And isn't the "glass glued to the display" simply one less piece of glass that needs to be recycled? The previous solution was a display unit with a thin piece of glass, and then a bigger protective piece of glass in front of that. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here).
Link to the program for anyone interested: http://www.apple.com/recycling/
We don't. For inputs we generally charge the cost of digging something up out of the dirt, and for outputs we charge the cost of burying something under the dirt. We shouldn't be surprised our economies have become a wasteful race of pleasurable consumption.
We're forcing our descendants to subsidize our lifestyle.
I honestly think that people are making a bigger deal out of it than it is. Also, the better something is designed the longer I will personally want to use it. Make stuff out of cardboard, but if it starts falling apart it will end up being thrown out sooner rather than later. My family still uses and owns the iBook G4 I purchased in 2004...
Because enough people say the following:
"I, for one, love my shiny new iPhone each year. No amount of (my own) preaching is going to get me to keep my iPhone 4S when Apple announces the iPhone 5 this year."
If Apple had an opt-in program where you could upgrade the screen, battery and logic board of your phone for $100, most people would opt for that.
Isn't the Nexus 7 hardware designed by Asus?