Instant Genius - The e-waste dilemma, with Josh Lepawsky

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Is your smartphone becoming more environmentally friendly? Are tech companies doing enough to reduce their carbon footprint? Josh Lepawsky, a researcher in the geography of waste shares his views on the problem of e-waste. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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From BBC Science Focus Magazine. This is Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Alex Hughes, staff writer at BBC Science Focus magazine. This week, I'm joined by Josh Lepowski. He's an expert in the geography of modern waste. He explains the issues that we are facing with the waste left behind from electrical products and what needs to be done to fight this problem.

When we use the term e-waste, what is it that we're actually referring to? Is it just what is left after someone has used and gone rid of a device they hold? Or is it all of the waste that comes from electronics? Is it anything that comes from electronics in any form? What is the e-waste term covering? Usually when people are using the term e-waste,

they do mean what consumers get rid of after they're done with their devices. That's thinking about it that way is usually the way things like environmental activist groups have framed the e-waste problem, even though those same groups may also acknowledge that pollution elsewhere in, depending on how you would want to describe it, the life cycle of electronics is also significant. In my own work, I find it important to expand the meaning of e-waste to include waste and pollution that happen anywhere in the lives of electronics. And the main reason for that is that when the, in my view, when the sort of picture of what e-waste is gets very narrowly confined to just, let's call it the end of the pipe when consumers get rid of things,

that ignores all of those stages where by most measures, by far the most waste and pollution actually arises. So the really tight framing of e-waste as a post-consumer thing actually has real implications, not just for how you think about it, but for how you think about ways to solve it as a problem. And if you forget or ignore or bracket out where most of that waste and pollution is happening, which is upstream in mining and manufacturing, then the kinds of solutions that one might develop to take care of the waste get narrowed too much. And there's often a mismatch between what is proposed as a solution and the volume of the waste and pollution arising. on your point there you're saying about the pipeline of e-waste do you think that the focus then is too heavily on the end of it and that we should be changing our focus or maybe just zooming out a little bit more yeah i mean it's a little bit of both i mean there's nothing inherently wrong with paying attention to post consumer uh waste but it sort of depends on the purposes to which that uh picture of e-waste is put if if the

story sort of starts and ends there at the end of the pipe, well, you're not coming up with solutions that are going to do anything to what's going into the pipe in the first place. And so if you focus too narrowly on the downstream post-consumer end of things, whether you've said it explicitly or not, you've decided to only focus on waste after it already exists, or I should say waste from electronics devices after they already exist. which mean that the likelihood of changing anything in, say, their design or manufacturing is going to be reduced if you're only focusing on what is coming out of the pipe rather than what's going into it in the first place. And is there a way that we can reduce the pollution at this first stage, or is this one of those things where you have to completely reinvent the wheel to sort of start again? No, we don't need to completely reinvent the wheel.

And it's important also to think carefully about who the sort of person is that we're talking about coming up with solutions. So you and I, as individual consumers of devices, have very little power relative to the manufacturers. You know, you and I can step into an electronics store if we want to get a new phone or a new laptop, what have you. And there, of course, is a massive array of makes and models presented to us. And it appears that we have a lot of choice. And we might think, okay, well, we'll vote with our dollars, as the saying sometimes goes. But when you look at the underlying design, the underlying chemistry, and the underlying labor practices in the electronics manufacturing sector, the idea that there's anything like meaningful choice between makes and models is really, well, it's nonsense, frankly.

The differences between brands and makes and models on those factors are so small as to make the idea of consumer choice really meaningless. So you and I, as individual consumers, have very little power, but organized consumer action that demands change through things like rules and regulation. is what's important. And we have ample examples that already exist in other industries that we can take lessons from. So, you know, I'm talking to you from Canada. I'm sure the rules and regulations are somewhat different between jurisdictions. But for example, it, you know, it was only sort of in the early 70s that cars were mandated to have seatbelts. And that came out of not voluntary action on the part of carmakers, but largely as a consequence of decades of organized consumer action, you might say citizen action, that then led to the formation of

ministries that regulated safety in omnibiles. And now, even if I wanted to buy a car without a seatbelt, I couldn't. So what does that tell us? Well, it tells us that we can change things in manufacturing, in, you know, a multi-billion-dollar industry. And if we can do it in one, we can do it in others. Another example I like to use is the food and pharmaceutical industries. And, you know, these are both multi-multi-billion dollar industries. And you and I in North America and Europe can, with relative degrees of confidence, you know, consume food, consume medicines and whatnot.

within margins of safety that we don't have to think too, too much about. That didn't happen by accident, and again, it wasn't the benevolence of companies that led to it. It was organized citizen action that led to, for example, in the United States, the formation of things like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the equivalence in Europe. And companies that make food and make pharmaceuticals have to demonstrate in advance of putting their products on the market that their products are safe within relative margins of safety. Are those systems perfect?

Of course not. But there are still concrete examples that show us that, in fact, we can regulate whole large industries in ways that demand that they demonstrate certain kinds of safety before their products come on the market. And if we can do it in one second, it tells us we can do it in another. It doesn't mean we can just copy paste from one sector to the other, and I don't mean to suggest that it's necessarily easy. I simply use those examples to demonstrate

that if it exists, then it's possible. We're talking about change here on the side of the companies that are creating these products. In the recent years, there's been a slight shift from these consumer tech companies to either be more environmental or be more environmental on the surface. You know, they use recycled materials. They've reduced the packaging on products. Is this making a difference? Or is this something that's more helped their margins and it sounds good when pasted somewhere? I think it's a mixed answer to that. Quite frankly, it's not that the change is being made by some companies in terms of, say, their use of recycled materials makes no difference. But it is also true that those kinds of strategies also help their reputation. I think sort of an

elephant in the room here, as it were, is that companies may be making their products, let's say, more energy efficient or more materials efficient in the sense of using less materials per device. That's good in certain ways, but when efficiency is on a per device basis, if companies then end up selling more devices after they've made those changes than they did before, then the efficiency gains in energy or materials get wiped out. Ecological economists have a name for this. They call it the rebound effect. Sometimes gets called it. called the Jevons Paradox, after a famous British economist from the 19th century studying the use of coal in the burgeoning industrial revolution. And he found this sort of counterintuitive finding

where, as machines got more efficient at using coal for energy, instead of the amount of coal use going down, it went up. Now we understand that part of the reason for that is as a machine gets more efficient, it gets cheaper to use so you can use that machine more and or more people can use more machines. So efficiency gains in the aggregate tend to wipe out those per unit per device gains in material and energy efficiency. So this really gets to, you know, business models that are premised on continued growth and continued growth of sales. And, And when it comes to electronics, as forms of commodities, they require the extraction of materials and energy.

And until someone finds a way to genuinely decouple growth from energy and material throughput, then we are stuck with a situation of sort of continual rebound. that is this expansion of materials and energy even as efficiency gains are made. Is there a way that these tech companies could reduce their footprint in a meaningful way? Let's say if you put business models aside, money aside, is there something that can be done that does solve this issue or does make a big change? Yeah, I mean, there are things that can be done. and to be fair that are being done. So some things that are being done include some of the regulations like the reduction

of hazardous substances legislation in the EU, which places limits on the use of certain chemicals deemed hazardous, specifically in the electronics manufacturing sector. That matters because it is changing the material composition of electronics, so it's changing what happens at the beginning of the pipe, rather than only managing the stuff at the end of it. There are other changes happening more broadly. Also in the EU, the REACH legislation, which of course I'm forgetting what the acronym stands for,

but it is similar in that it attempts to reduce the use of hazardous chemicals across all sectors of European economy. And again, that's important because it changes manufacturing. It's changing waste before it becomes waste, if you will. When it comes to electronics devices themselves, they can be made to be longer lasting and more repairable. That matters because a longer lasting device, it's a device that amateurizes, if you will,

all of the energy and materials embodied in it over a longer period of time. And that's a form of energy and material conservation. It's not just a hardware problem, though. Electronics are really interesting to think about because they're such complicated machines. And of course, there's a software side of all of this. And the businesses that design and make the physical devices aren't always also designing software. And so software often can be a source of some people would call it premature obsolescence. What that means is, you know, the latest update for whatever app that you love,

if software developers ignore compatibility with older devices, then those older devices become less usable, even though they might technically be able to run the software if new applications were designed. with backward compatibility, it's sometimes called, and software were designed to, in such a way that it would allow existing devices to continue to run the latest updates. I'm not sure if you're aware of this or if they have it and where you are, but there is a phone company called Fairphone, and they allow the device to be repaired easily.

It comes with the chance to buy extra parts, longer software updates and security updates, they mine their materials in more effective ways. Is that the kind of way that we could be going or is a good way of approach? Yes, I do. So I do know Fairphone and I think that that kind of model is one kind of model that would help quite substantially. I think the issue there is that they remain a niche market. at this point. And we're also confronted in an industrial system with the problem of if only one company like Fairphone or even a few companies like Fairphone exist and they are just added to the status quo, then even though on an individual company basis, they're doing things in better ways,

the aggregate system has grown, and so we're back to that problem of rebound. I think one of the big arguments that a lot of people make in this area is that this could all be solved with the idea of a circular economy, but is that actually possible to build a consumer tech circular economy, or is that sort of a false belief? Yeah, well, I wouldn't call it false. I would say it, but it does involve some magical thinking at this point in that there are material combinations of modern electronics, where various kinds of metals exist in amalgams that, you know, sort of at a chemical bond level, that there is no way to recycle them, even not from a cost perspective per se,

but just from a pure technical point of view. That doesn't mean electronics writ, large are not recyclable, but they do contain materials combinations that cannot be disaggregated back into their chemical constituents. And so, you know, the circular economy notion is, it is, it's more notional than practical in a lot of ways. It's not that it's an inherently bad idea, but we should be, I think, careful of being distracted by it, if it comes with the suggestion that it is always in everywhere. Practical, not practical, like in the sense of actually being able to be achieved, even from a technical point of view.

I would also point out that an economy can be circular, but if the size of that circle is growing, then you're still getting an increasing amount of energy and throughput through the overall system. And as a consequence, you know, that energy and materials has to come from somewhere. You can't have a growing system that is feeding on itself, if that makes sense, just from a straight-up thermodynamic point of view, it is not possible. We've spoken a lot about the role of companies and the starting point in this process.

But one of the things that's been a big topic recently is the right to repair. Do you think this helps at all with the environmental footprint of tech? Or does it just push blame onto the consumers? Yeah, it's a bit of a mixed picture. So I think right to repair is quite important, and it's important for a variety of ways. One is it's a very concrete example of what organized consumer and organized citizen action can do in that it is leading to the passage of legislation requiring devices. to be more repairable

within certain parameters. Also legislation requiring spare parts to be available, this kind of thing. Well, I think it's good. I also think right to repair has its limits, and those include there's a difference between the right to repair and the right to repairability.

So if designers of devices make design decisions that, whether intentional or not, that lead to repairability itself being designed out of the system, you can have the right to repair a device, but if there is no way to repair it, if repairability itself is designed out, then it doesn't really matter if you have the right to repair. There's also the issue of, again, you know, repair is, having the right to repair is a good thing, but it is also dealing with things after they already exist after the upstream waste and pollution has already been emitted.

And so it can, well, right to repair can help. It cannot fully account for and solve the pollution that has happened before consumers even have their devices in their hands. Talking about the mining section of the issue, at the rate that we're mining and making tech products, is there simply just a real? that we run out of materials in the future? I think, you know, true exhaustion is really not the risk to be thinking of what the, more so the issue is running out of economically extractable resources. So it's not like when things are mined,

they don't go away. They're just, you know, the, let's say the copper to pick one particular material. It doesn't, and when it's mined and then moved into devices, it still exists somewhere on the surface, but it becomes a problem of re-aggregating those materials into amounts that are economically viable for being sent back into the manufacturing sector. And, you know, so there are a number of metals with quite different availability, physical availability, on the planet, but I don't think the issue is so much about literally running out of them so much as dispersing and dissipating them so much that it is too difficult, too expensive to recoup them that would have the more immediate and kind of deleterious effects on their use in industrial

manufacturing. Looking forward a couple of years, let's say 2025, a bit further on, what is it that really needs to be done to not put an end to e-waste, but to improve the situation as it is? Well, I think continuing action to shift how things get made in the first place is where a lot of the attention needs to be made or put. And I think, you know, in a few different ways, I think that focusing on reducing and eliminating the toxic or hazardous materials that are used directly in devices, but also in the what an industry would get called the intermediate inputs. These might be things like one of the

particularly important ones are what gets called fluorinated greenhouse gases. Without getting too technical, these are gases that are used in a process of cleaning. components as they're being manufactured. The gases don't make their way into the devices themselves, but they are extremely potent. Greenhouse gases, often hundreds, if not thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. And their residence times in the atmosphere

are centuries to millennia. And currently there's no real substitute in the manufacturing process for those fluorinated greenhouse gases. So that's a real bottleneck for the industry, even if it wants to, as it should, you know, find ways to reduce or eliminate its contributions to the climate crisis.

There are some parts of the manufacturing process in that case around screens, for example, for which there is as yet no substitute process. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Josh Lopowski, examining the issues of e-waste produced by modern electrical products and how companies can change to improve this problem. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents,

as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find a lot of your best. online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music.

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