Welcome! In this issue we focus on the end of life of our digital devices. Enjoy reading!
🗑️ End of life & waste
Last November, we visited Loxy, an electronic waste processing center. The company was kind enough to open its doors and introduce us to the issues of dismantling and reconditioning digital waste. Here are some highlights from our notes:
The rapid growth of e-waste in recent years (+21% worldwide in 5 years) has a direct impact on the company's growth: it had to grow its staff by 12% in just one month to be able to process the 15 tons of equipment delivered every day. According to Loxy, the responsibility lies in the shorter lifespan of devices, the increasing and often unnecessary digitalisation of objects, such as the tens of thousands of single-use electronic cigarettes, each containing a lithium battery, and filling their dumpsters.
It is difficult to speak of "waste" as electronic equipment is often still functioning, sometimes even new. If there is a market for the objects, they are put back into circulation. If not, they are scrapped because they are considered "obsolete" or not profitable enough. In their situation, it is regulation that forces waste to arrive at the company, but it is the market that dictates the reuse or shredding of functional equipment.
Dismantling is an important issue. It is the team's most handyman-like people who take care of it (there is no dedicated R&D unit). They mainly use handicraft means and empirical tests to try to dismantle, for example, the electronic labels of the stores: these are thrown away when the lithium batteries (non-rechargeable) run out. The team tries to separate the plastic before sending the batteries (which are at risk of exploding) to specialized companies for burial. It is not clear what to do with these batteries today, as their collection and recycling remains complex and the recycling channels are often overwhelmed.
Of the dozens of metals contained in electronic components, only four are recovered in specialized laboratories: gold, silver, copper and palladium.
Waste management does not attract the same interest as "innovation" and remains rather opaque. In the early 2010s, Dietmar Offenhuber, then at the MIT Senseable City Lab, proposed to develop the field of "waste forensics" to understand what happens to our waste. As part of the Trash|Talk project, researchers asked thousands of Seattle residents to insert GPS trackers into their waste (old shoes, printer toner, TV, etc.). The researchers then tracked the movements of this waste in the United States and around the world. This strategy allows to discover the informal dimension of waste treatment, but also the global character and the thousands of kilometers traveled by these objects at the end of their life.
If this approach is attractive, Josh Lepawsky, a geographer specialized in discard studies, questions it. He studied the controversies on electronic waste between 2010 and 2015 that led to the Basel Convention (see his map of controversies). His work shows the difficulty to decide what is waste. In two articles, he invites us to go beyond the shocking photos of mountains of electronic waste in Africa, which would not accurately represent the global flows (burying a ton of waste in California would cost 4x less than putting it on a container ship). He reminds us that the volume of industrial manufacturing waste is far greater than that of household e-waste, and that this needs to be addressed as a priority.
🏭→🗑️🗑️🗑️🗑️🗑️ vs. 🏡→🗑️ Comparison across Europe of the scale of waste generated by electronics manufacturing vs. household e-waste in 2016 (18.7 vs. 3.8 million tons).
Second lives
What if the cloud was made of old smartphones? Jennifer Switzer of the University of San Diego is working on “Junkyard Computing”, and shows how "old" smartphones could be leveraged to build server farms, with costs 40x lower (theoretical calculation) than Amazon S3, with the advantage of being able to use the batteries to charge the phones when the energy is least carbon intensive.
A triple screen laptop made from old tablets and a repairable Frame.work computer motherboard.
Digital Limits project news
We present a paper on the daily experience of connectivity limits at the Francophone Human Machine Interaction conference (IHM'23) in Troyes in early April. Louis Vinet conducted a series of interviews with students on their experience of connectivity problems, especially in university residences. The interviews show the difficulty to negotiate and limit the uses individually and different forms of pressure to connect, but also the moments of saturation and the desire to establish some limits.
A few months ago we organized workshops on the digital footprint at the Gaîté Lyrique for young students. We have documented the protocol of one of these workshops imagined by the designer Lou Vettier, which helps to physically represent the weight of different contents and uses of digital technology.
Without limits 🙃
Disassembling the single-use electronic sextoy from Womanizer. We learn that the manufacturer may have even taken precautions to ensure that the object remains off even if you manage to change the battery.
Piles of discarded but perfectly functional Macbooks go to waste because of a lockout feature that ties the device to an Apple user's account and makes it unusable even when the data has been erased.
Due to a software failure and the disappearance of a supplier, a Massachusetts school has been unable to turn off its lights for over a year.
Other news
On the difficulty of comparing the carbon impact of products: yes, 20 steaks have the same eco2 impact as a smartphone, but mainly because they have nothing in common in terms of impact category.
While the smartphone market is experiencing a record decline, Fairphone is going against the grain and raising 49 million euros.
A website to find out how long an object lasts and where it breaks or wears out in general, thanks to feedback from the community on a reddit page.
While the average image weight on a web page was ≈ 1mo in 2022, the Small File Photo Festival encourages and rewards smaller photos. You can take a look at the exhibition online.
In Berlin, the Toward a Minor Tech workshop was held as part of the Transmediale festival. Artists and researchers discussed the problems of scale related to the digital, touching on the potentialities and limits of a digital space that operates on a human scale.
An article on the phenomenon of chinese tutorial videos to learn how to recover gold from electronic components (don't do that!).
If you have a Galaxy smartphone, you can probably turn it into a desktop computer by simply plugging it into a monitor with the SamsungDex feature. Your applications are then displayed in desktop mode and the screen of your phone becomes a touchpad (already tested here, handy when you forgot your computer charger...). A use that could, if pushed, be an interesting way to reduce the number of digital devices. Some companies even offer docking stations to connect a multitude of devices. Others go further and imagine that the smartphone replaces the motherboard of a laptop to enhance the video game experience.
ARCEP AND ADEME have published the 3rd part of the study on the digital footprint in France, but we will tell you about it next month.
And to close this theme, a little Quebec rap about recycling.