320
The World’s E-Waste Has Reached a Crisis Point
(www.wired.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
320 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
34792 readers
386 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
@ordellrb @eugenia The other place the motherboards of old phones could be repurposed is in embedded processors.
Most home appliances feature embedded processors and motherboards these days. Many commercial and industrial buildings and structures feature a range of embedded sensors.
In many cases, a repurposed three-year-old or even six-year-old iPhone or Samsung Galaxy motherboard is overkill in terms of being capable for these kinds of applications.
Especially if they're reflashed with an embedded device-focussed operating system, such as QNX.
Instead of making new motherboards for embedded devices, why not repurpose old consumer tech instead?
@ajsadauskas @ordellrb @eugenia Quite a few of us have done that through the last two decades or more. Why not?! If it's still useful, use it. I used a few older computers as print servers for businesses even back in the 1990's.
The issue is the price of new hardware vs the hourly wages of people who are capable of reprogramming old stuff. If you are going to pay $100/h to get old stuff working and buying new stuff costs $20 then it's cheaper to throw it out and buy new stuff.
@etbe @ajsadauskas True.
@etbe @ajsadauskas so it's on quantity. If you reprogram one device for 500 dollars and then reflash with that firmware other 1000 devices it will be much cheaper than new devices.
Reprogramming the 1000 other devices won't be as hard as the first one but it won't be trivial as they may be all on different versions of the software and there may be hardware variations too.
Just to triage the devices and determine which ones are good enough is going to be non trivial.
@etbe definitely. That's why ve have internet - to connect many users of given devices. Like entuziasts of retro gaming consoles: some dudes spend time of reprogramming others help with sharing - fixing - adapting.
@mcSlibinas @etbe Worth noting that in the six months after Apple releases the thinnest, best iPhone ever each year, it would receive several million two-year-old iPhones as trade-ins.
So you could theoretically reflash several million units of nearly identical hardware with embedded Linux (or QNX), remove the batteries (and screens?).
You would then have several million near-identical motherboards ready for second life embedded in appliances or sensors.
@mcSlibinas @etbe Really good point.
The development time and cost is an overhead. That's divided between the number of units you produce.
If the programming costs are $100k and you produce one unit, then that unit costs $100k.
But if you flash the same software on to 1 million units, then it's just 10 cents per unit.
Worth remembering that millions of people junking their two-year-old iPhones and Samsung Galaxies at roughly the same time.
I think the broader underlying issue is that our economy is optimised for labour productivity, rather than making the most out of finite environmental resources.
It really should be the other way around.