(slow upbeat music)
- Worldwide 1.7 billion smartphones sell in one year.
- What you're buying is so much more
than what's in your hand,
you're buying a lot of impacts.
The model we have in our capitalist world
is to sell you stuff, right?
- E-waste or electronic waste is a huge global problem
that's growing every year.
But fixing it is gonna take more than
telling people they shouldn't upgrade their phones.
- Manufacturers have convinced everybody
that recycling is benign, don't worry,
buy it, just recycle it, not a problem
and they're designing things for the dump basically.
- To stop toxic e-waste from piling up
by the millions of tons,
our devices need to be built to be more upgradable,
more fixable, and more recyclable.
The question is, can we redesign our devices
to have the best in-tech and the best for our planet?
Smartphones, computers, monitors,
everything internet of things,
once they're thrown out, they become e-waste
and the world is generating e-waste at an alarming clip.
- I could give you numbers
but they're so astronomically they won't mean much.
More than 50 million metric tons
every year is produced and that's growing.
- While most of us stop thinking about our smartphones
around the time the battery gives out,
Jim Puckett founder of the Basel Action Network
is most concerned with everything that happens
to them afterwards.
- If you can imagine people get rid of their computers
every three years maybe,
they get rid of their phones about every two years,
just multiply that by every human on earth,
it's a mountain, a very large mountain of e-waste.
♪ Gotta learn to reduce, reuse, recycle. ♪
- Reduce, reuse, recycle is a nice term of art,
but the reduction side of it
which is the most important is always forgotten.
It all ends up recycling.
Probably about half of your old electronics
go to the global South,
and it's justified by saying,
well we're gonna give it another life.
They can fix it in the market there
which sounds really good.
- But a lot of the time they can't fix it.
Sometimes the components inside our devices
wear out too quickly or are stuck together
with glue instead of screws,
to make them a hair thinner than the competition.
Instead of finding a second life in the global South
our toxic e-waste might find its way to a landfill.
- We knew that we had to track this waste
to really tell the story about it.
We did a program where we went out to recyclers
in the US and dropped computing equipment
with a GPS tracker inserted into it.
- What they found was pretty incredible.
40% of the e-waste that was supposed to be recycled
in the US got shipped to junk yards overseas.
- There's no pollution control
and most of these are in Southeast Asia,
in farmlands so they're contaminating
a lot of the local food supply.
- BAN went public with their GPS data.
- Blew people's minds because they were like caught,
and of course it's made the industry
really behave a lot better.
Now we have a program called E-Stewards
which is a certification program for the good guys.
- The process still isn't perfect
but the E-Stewards recyclers employ
a number of strict practices
to make recycling safer
and more environmentally friendly.
Cascade Asset Management is one of those
E-Stewards recyclers.
- We process about 300,000 to 400,000 pounds
of electronics per month
so we're moving a lot of equipment through here.
- Cascade is able to fix and resell 30% of its inventory
before recycling even comes into play.
But the pace of change in today's technology
can be hard to keep up with.
- We're starting to see a lot more smartphones
and tablets coming through,
some items maybe only two or three years old
and there's no life left in them.
- When I grew up you'd buy a toaster
or refrigerator would last at least 20 years,
but the manufacturers don't design the equipment
to last a long time
so in effect they're planning it's obsolescence.
Sure electronics change quickly
but they can anticipate upgrades.
Do we really need to have things die so quickly?
- You've probably been told before
that you should buy less stuff,
that you should consume more consciously,
but in order to empower consumers to make that choice
manufacturers need to design things to last longer.
Right now that's a tough sell
to most of the big companies making our electronics
but some startups are taking notice.
- I've been in the electronics industry
for the last 11 years
and I realized there's hardly any repair.
Let's say if I were to buy a new device
the charging port stops working,
but it's almost like a moral dilemma
do I get this repaired or do I buy a new device?
- Sharad Mittal, founder of the smartphone company
Teracube saw a third option.
Make a phone that's actually built to last a long time
and easy to repair.
The result is a device that's much more
environmentally friendly.
- Teracube 2e, it works like any other smartphone,
it's an Android smartphone,
runs all the apps that are available
from Google Play store.
We have put in recycled plastics into the body of the phone.
The unique feature is the four year payment care warranty.
There's no glue used, so anyone can take them apart
and we'll make the spare parts available
so people can do their own repairs as well.
- Modular components and durable materials
are just a couple of ways manufacturers
can help consumers stay current
without throwing their entire device away.
Organizations like iFixit are also
encouraging more companies to make technical guides
and spare phone parts available to every user
in order to encourage people to repair their own devices.
- You know, we think we live in a democracy
but what we're able to buy,
that changes our world more than politics believe it or not.
Everything is becoming electronic these days.
Can't we make things last longer
and still have innovation?
- Us building the Teracube, we've shown that it's possible.
We are here to make a change.
(slow upbeat music)
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