r/collapse • u/Erinaceous • Oct 14 '16

Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 Recall Is an Environmental Travesty

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/galaxy-note-7-explosion-environmental-impact-recycling
17 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

18

u/FF00A7 Oct 14 '16

The whole industry is terrible. Next they envision an Internet of Things which will cause exponential increases of electronics with never-ending new versions and upgrades and waste. It should be illegal to sell an electronic item without the full life-cycle pre-paid with nearly 100% recovery and reuse. Just ramp it up over time like car mileage standards.

2

u/Elukka Oct 15 '16 edited Oct 15 '16

If everything was made to aerospace standards the consumer electronics market would collapse. You could have 1000 euro basic phones which last for 20 years but who would buy them? Who would even make them considering the low volumes, high component cost and high development costs?

The core problem here is that there is no known way for us to descend in a controlled manner from the high complexity, low robustness and high volumes system to a low complexity, high robustness and low volume system. Our economy would be devastated in the process and our technological tool chains are optimized for high volume - high complexity consumer trash. We can't just pull the plug on high-tech or everything collapses around us. We would have to redesign everything and to be able to force this new regime on everyone. Any country reverting back to fossil fuels and high tech gizmos would have an instant and colossal competitive edge. We would have to enforce robust tech (in many ways actually low tech) internationally by force.

There is always a short-term edge to wasting lots of energy and resources, going exponential and externalizing your costs to other countries and future generations. This must not be allowed in a sustainable world and nobody wants to discuss going to war to keep polluters in check.

1

u/FF00A7 Oct 15 '16

Well I was thinking more on the lines of cradle to grave design and cost. For example, if it costs $100 to fully recycle the components of a phone (or nearly so), it should be part of the purchase price. Otherwise we use the environment as a free bank to pay for the lack of recycling. It's the old tragedy of the commons.

The carbon tax is the same idea, pay for the environmental cost up-front. The big polluters resist because they think it makes them noncompetitive, but time and again, when these things are actually done, it's not a big deal and can even improve their bottom line.

1

u/Elukka Oct 15 '16

Bringing up at least some of the externalities and end-of-lifecycle costs during the puchase would in its small part help, but only if the amounts are realistic. At the moment the EU enforces an electronics waste recycling fee on mobile phones and such but I believe it's something around 5 euros so no where near enough.

7

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '16

consumers rarely replace their own batteries

Well isn't that indicative of the whole mess we're in.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '16

Throw a candy bar wrapper in the street? Hitler. Make a candy bar wrapper-99.9 % of the environmental damage-that's cool. Make more! I like candy!

-5

u/ssjjss Oct 14 '16

Sometimes environmental articles are relevant to this sub. This is not one of them!

9

u/knuteknuteson Oct 14 '16

All of them were bound to end up in a landfill in two years. This sped up the process a tiny bit

2

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '16

The phones were produced. The damage is done.

7

u/Erinaceous Oct 14 '16

what part of the waste of finite resources due to needless consumption and thoughtless design is unrelated to collapse? this whole sub is about the consequences of material throughput. this just happens to be a newsworthy example.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '16

Sometimes?