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E-waste is growing 5x faster than it's recycled, says UN
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Fitbits that aren't the latest model have battery lives shorter than 12 hours (many users reporting 6 hours or less) after a firmware update. It's a well-reported issue on the fitbit community.
And not to be rude but have you used any electronics released in the past decade? Battery life always goes to crap almost exactly 2 years after purchase, and no one releases products with replaceable batteries. Appliances use plastic parts and come with a plethora of unnecessary features all on one circuit board so when one feature breaks the appliance is dead, with replacement parts being almost as costly as a new appliance. Inkjet printers refuse to work without all the colors being full, even to the point of not scanning when out of ink. There's even a story going around about a business-class HP printer that stopped working (full on ink) because the credit card attached to the ink subscription expired.
It's gone long past planned obsolescence at this point. Whether it's software or hardware, companies want you subscribed for life. Anything less and they break the devices that were able to dupe you into thinking you owned.
Disposable battery technology is disposable. We don't have truly rechargable batteries yet ... and the EV batteries only last longer (AFAIK) because they've got better cooling systems and are higher grade -- read more expensive -- components.
That's not the entire story there ... it's just cheaper to make it one board. You can eliminate some points of failure by using one board as well.
It's definitely ridiculous appliance companies aren't providing parts. I'd also like to point out ... I was specifically responding to the widespread e-waste from the mobile devices sector. Not "all things that could possible become e-waste in 2024." GUARANTEED planned obselence is what has been happening there for years with "2 years of device security updates" and that nonsense is ending.
Yeah, don't buy HP.
Subscriptions aren't necessarily the enemy when it comes to e-waste. They're bad for ownership, but they're not bad for planned obsolescence and e-waste. If your subscribers need your device to keep working to keep paying you, you've got a much stronger incentive to keep the device working vs just abandoning it.
This already happened with software, there really isn't "buy once then buy again and again and again" software anymore, the vast majority of software has gone subscription. This is also true of online games like CSGO, Hunt Showdown, Fortnite, etc.
It's just a matter of making things into subscriptions that are mutually beneficial. Your printer being an InkJet printer with a vendor locked in subscription that doesn't offer any real service is absurd and should be illegal. Your smart home camera having a subscription to store cloud video, provide new features and security updates ... that's a reasonable service that a lot of "normal" people don't want to do themselves (and incentivizes manufactures to keep their devices working so you keep paying).
A big part of the problem with e-waste is that companies setup fancy features to sell a product but didn't plan for how to support that product's software for the life of the product (because they're not making any more after the point of sale) ... so we end up with a very insecure piece of unserviceable e-waste.
Don't get me wrong we've still got a long way to go before we find a solution that handles the problem for all the various devices being manufactured these days. However, credit where it's due the mobile devices sector / "big tech" is doing better than they have for the last 15 years, and that's all I'm trying to contest. There IS change happening.