The Cost of Our Disposable Tech Obsession

E-Waste’s impact on climate change and Apple’s unexpected support for the right-to-repair bill

Ricky Lanusse

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Published in

Predict

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7 min read

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Sep 5

Photo Courtesy of GMA News Online

We are a generation obsessed with technology, supported by the yet-to-be-defeated Moore’s Law of the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (though they are now so small that it is getting harder to make them even smaller). We have gadgets for everything — from food to computers, reading devices, and our ever-changing cell phones.

And we replace them almost as often as we buy new clothes.

New upgrade? New toy. And throw away our old one, no matter if it’s running as good as ever.

My parents got married in 1989. One of their presents was a Philips Tropical fridge. The same one my mom still has at home.

But I wasn’t this lucky. Since moving alone 15 years ago, I had to change my fridge three times, even though I tried and persisted in fixing them. That’s a fridge every five years versus one that lasts for a lifetime. That is a disposable climate-sucking machine versus an environmentally friendly one, no matter if the new ones had an A+ in energy saving.

Can you imagine how much electronic waste we generate? Where does it all go?

After years of deliberately slowing down iPhones and piling e-waste, Apple just moved in the Tropical direction.

A culture of disposability

E-waste is now the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Some forms of it have been growing exponentially. The UN has called it a tsunami of e-waste.

Every year, our capitalistic expenses generate 50 million tons of electronic waste. The e-waste discarded in 2021 alone weighs more than the Great Wall of China, the heaviest man-made structure in the world. It’s like throwing away 1,000 laptops every second. About half of this waste comes from personal gadgets like computers and smartphones, and the rest comes from bigger appliances. According to WEEE Forum, there are about 16 billion phones worldwide, and over 5 billion will become e-waste this year. If we keep going like this, we could hit 120 million tons of yearly e-waste by 2050.