Me: In this blog I am gonna talk about e-waste .

Others : What? We already know  that why are u explaining in this blog. We know that e-waste is electronic waste and it can be recycled, repaired and re-used blah..blah..blah never ends

Me : Now wait and listen to me patiently

So what is e-waste?

As you know it is a type of waste where electronic items /product  life-cycle has ended and has limited chances of reparability. But many of these products aren’t fully used by people which works properly and unfortunately ends up in landfills (very sad).


 

Now we are seeing a very disturbing trend in the industry where people  buying  electronics has become  more consistent and has accelerated the growth of e-waste.

Now what are the causes and who is to blame for these ?

Consumers and Manufactures play a major role in this use and throw strategy

Consumer’s role :

  • They end up buying/upgrading to new smart-phone every 2 years .Even though it works properly.

  • Not trying to repair the devices to prolong it .(Of-course service centers will loot them) .

  • They do not research while buying devices and want way faster performance device when their old device isn’t working up to their expectations and end up changing devices  which even contributes to these waste (It’s really a very bad trend) .

Manufacturer’s role :

  • They manufacture devices which doesn’t really last well in terms of durability.

  • End up slowing down their devices through a buggy software update to promote newer phone models

  • Making device-repair near impossible for consumers (Apple i-phone is one of them).

  • Repair costs are very costlier and people end up buying newer devices. These all come under planned obsolescence 

Others : Well no device is perfect why do you want it to last longer

Me : Yes , I know no device is perfect and there’s no hard and fast rule to prolong it forever. So let’s dicuss it’s effects 


Effects of e-waste:



  • Majority of wastes end up in land-fills.

  • Even developed countries like USA are involved in exporting the e-waste to other developing countries like China, Africa etc to recycle

  • Many of them end up in unauthorized way of recycling like burning the pcb’s. Extracting gold ,copper and tin in a dangerous method which causes heath-hazard which end up contributing to air-pollution in the region and ground-water contamination.

  •  As you know products in landfills take way more longer to decompose make the issue way worse.

What can we do to reduce it?

 E-wastes are unavoidable .But reducing is in our hands.

  • First while buying a device/products do a proper planning and then proceed to shop. This has two major benefits first you will be able to use it for longer-time(shorten the time of upgrading your device).Secondly the product will not end up in land-fills/un-authorized recycler’s hands.

  •  Buy products from brands which has quite good experience of treating customers in after sales- service.

  • If you are not short on budget buy a good product.

  • “Boycott” is a powerful word for companies which don’t listen to their customers.

  • Google introduced ‘Project Treble‘ for phones starting from  Android 8.0 (Oreo) so that you can flash GSI’s to their respective phones .So you can enjoy new android versions .

  • Look out for authorized recycling centers and ask them how they recycle devices.

  • Bootloader unlocking is a way you can save your properly working phones and flash custom rom if your oem has stopped supporting the device you own .Some manufacturers like Xioami, Oneplus, Pixel, Asus etc offer them easily.
Remember it’s our duty to reduce e-waste .Manufacturers offer many device .It’s up to you to choose it and use till it's life-cycle ends.

In European countries  they initiated “Right to Repair“ law which offers consumer centric devices to be    repaired and the ‘repair score’ is shown to make aware so that customers buy more efficient products.


 In next article i'll be talking about right to repair

"Thank you for reading full article"

Reference:-

GSI - Generic system images