The Real Cause of E-Waste

With environmental issues now at the forefront of government policy and media coverage, reducing waste, particularly nonrecyclable waste is more important than ever. E-waste, discarded electrical and electronic devices are a persistent problem in landfills worldwide. They are difficult to recycle, often contain toxic substances and in consumer goods, have a surprisingly short service life. The reasons for this are different from consumer perception, explains Jim Anderton.

Access all episodes of End of the Line on Engineering TV along with all of our other series.

To see any images, graphs, charts, graphics, and/or videos to which the transcript may be referring, watch the above video.

This is my clock radio. More accurately this used to be my clock radio. This device is now junk, e-waste, and it’s going into a landfill. I don’t want it to go into a landfill, and in fact I’d like it to do what it did for the last five years, wake me up every morning to AM talk radio, but it doesn’t do that anymore.

And there is an irony to that. I also own one of these. This is a Zenith clock radio made in the 1950s although it was made long before I was born, I keep in the basement and listen to it when I’m at my workbench. Yes, it still works, the radio and the clock despite the fact that uses a mechanical clock full of moving parts, and the classic All-American five vacuum tube set up that formed& the basis for almost all mass-market radio sets in America at the time. This unit used brittle, UV sensitive styrene plastics, continuously running, cheap stamped steel gears, and hot running, fragile vacuum tubes yet 70 years later, it still works. This fully digital unit is dead after five years. Is this because they don’t make them like they used to?

Now you think I’m& gonna say yes,& but in fact the opposite is true. I looked at the retail price of the old radio. It cost about $25 in the early 1950s. Using a readily available online inflation calculator, this translates to a price today of approximately $252. I paid less than 30 bucks for the digital unit, and I’ll bet you could’ve founded it for $20 on Amazon.

So here’s where the e-waste factor comes in: $250 table radios do exist today. They are durable and perform far better than that old vacuum tube unit from the 1950s. But like millions of people today, as a consumer, I feel that spending that much money for a device whose only purpose is to wake me up in the morning is wasteful, and I’d rather spend the cash on other things. As economists say, there is an opportunity cost in investing that much money on a radio alarm clock. The quid pro quo for the $20 radio however, is a limited life expectancy. Is five years adequate?

Today, the answer is yes, as software-controlled devices with higher levels of functionality and connectivity, made the old unit obsolete and undesirable, even before it blew up. Environmentalists who complain about planned obsolescence simply don’t get it. Consumers may be willing to spend exactly the same amount adjusted for inflation, that they did in the 1950s for products that are more durable than they were then, and keep them forever. But there are tremendous incentives to not do that. And there are similar incentives on manufacturers to keep offering more useful, higher performance consumer goods to induce users to trade up. You can argue that this has environmental price, and it does, but there is no way to eliminate the natural human desire for newer, better things.

In Europe, manufacturers often are compelled to develop consumer goods with a product stewardship plan which accounts for their end-of-life environmental impact. BMW for example has a program to dismantle older cars and recycle as much of the materials as possible. But BMWs are expensive, and programs like that are one reason why.

At this point, I see very little motivation on the part of the public to pay more to buy consumer electronics with a guaranteed waste diversion program built into the purchase price. It’s too late for my digital radio. It’s going to the landfill. How will I prevent the next from going there too? Simple. I’m not replacing it. My smart phone has that functionality built into it now. Of course I’m likely to get rid of this phone in two or three years, as better models are available. And part of what makes the next one better may be a guarantee of recyclability at the end of its life.