PC Probe: “Recycled” devices add to the e-waste pile
Reliance on cloud services cripples working hardware in its prime, Stewart Mitchell discovers
So much for environmentally friendly: Stewart Mitchell discovers that certain tech firms are still putting profit before the planet by hamstringing hardware while it’s in its prime.
With environmentalists earmarking 2020 as our “last chance” to save the planet, you’d think tech companies would be eager to at least be seen to be doing their bit. However, recent cases have shown that some tech firms are still putting profit before the planet – and with devices increasingly tied to online services, the problem will only get worse.
The situation was highlighted when smart speaker company Sonos was caught deliberately bricking its devices as part of a “Trade Up” procedure that rewarded customers with a 30% discount on new kit – if they agreed to put their old hardware into a terminal “Recycle mode” mode”.
The negative aspects of the scheme – from a company that claims “sustainability is non-negotiable” – were discovered when a recycling centre worker bemoaned having to strip down and destroy five perfectly good Sonos speakers with a secondhand value of around £200 each.
“This is the most environmentally unfriendly abuse and waste of perfectly good hardware I’ve seen in five years working as a recycler,” said recycling centre staffer Devin Wilson on his Twitter feed. “We could have sold these, and ensured they were reused, but now we have to scrap them.
“Anyone even remotely familiar with recycling can tell you the mantra ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’,” Wilson added. “Recycling takes energy, so reuse is always better. Sonos is throwing any claimed environmental friendliness in the trash in n order to sell more speakers.”
Industry ndustry experts agreed. “That’s not the way that hat sustainability works,” said Kyle Wiens, founder of the iFixit website that encourages user repair. “Once you have manufactured a speaker, we should keep that speaker working – functional as a speaker – for as long as possible, so that we don’t have to make more speakers.”
Sonos claimed in a media statement that the he decision was taken because, “over time, technology chnology will progress in ways these products ducts are not able to accommodate” and that it didn’t ’t want to reintroduce older speakers to the secondhand market in case people got a bad impression of its products. It might be too late for that.
Sonos also says details of the Trade Up scheme, introduced in October 2019, are clear in its terms and conditions. “Once you have initiated the recycling process, your Sonos product will no longer be usable,” they read. “By participating, you acknowledge and agree that your Sonos product will no longer function as a speaker or network device.”
Aside from angering users, including those who activated “Recycle mode” by accident, the move was slammed by environmental experts, who say that deliberately hamstringing perfectly good equipment is a waste of the world’s resources.
“A lot of the embodied environmental footprint in the supply chain is in the production phase,” said Professor Lenny Koh, director of the Advanced Resource Efficiency Centre at the University of Sheffield.
“It’s the mining of critical materials, the production of the materials, the manufacturing, the soldering, chemical
processes involved and the logistics of moving the materials and products around. The environmental impact is huge,” she said. “It’s hard to know whether Sonos’ scheme is really about the environment or something simply to sell more products.”
Pulling plugs
Sonos is hardly the first tech company to turn usable hardware into waste with little regard for consumers or the environment. It isn’t even the latest.
Customers of American ISP Spectrum, for example, spent up to $1,000 on control panels, cameras and sensors as part of a home security service the company pushed as an added extra to connectivity. But in January, the company announced that “as of February 5, 2020, we’ll no longer support Spectrum Home Security service”.
As a result, customers were left with redundant hardware as it had been configured so it wouldn’t work with other platforms. The story mirrors an earlier tale from 2016, when Google-owned Nest closed down the cloud services that powered the Revolv smart home hub.
And therein lies the rub of smart devices. Whether they are speakers, home hubs or televisions, and regardless of how simple a function the device performs, they fall over if the support network is switched off.
“The moment you say ‘I’m going to make an internetenabled something’, all of a sudden you are making the functionality of the device as brittle as that system – we see this all the time,” said Wiens, adding that older “dumb” equipment lasted years, even after a manufacturer might have gone bust.
Contrast that with Samsung’s $6,000 smart fridge, launched in 2014 but largely defunct by 2016 because Google changed its Calendar API and Samsung never updated the app on the fridge’s integrated tablet, leaving customers with an expensive dumb fridge.
According to Wiens, manufacturers are reluctant to support cloud services as they represent an ongoing cost, but that means consumers have to keep buying replacements if they want the latest features. “You can’t buy a TV now that’s not smart, with some version of Linux and connectivity. Are they going to be making security updates available for a 15-year-old television? My TV is 15 years old and it’s fine,” he said.
“All the evidence we’re seeing is that even the biggest companies, who potentially have the resources to support their products, don’t. The moment you buy, they abandon it.”
Sonos, for example, could easily have decommissioned the speakers that it bricked without making them useless, had it wanted to. “The products have an analogue input, where you can plug your phone in,” Wiens said. “The responsible thing to do is give people the option, say ‘We can secure the device by shutting down the internet-connected part, but you can still plug devices in and it will function as a speaker’.”
Gone before their time
Despite industry-wide pledges to reduce e-waste, experts say design-stage decisions guarantee a premature end of life. Headphones with non-replaceable leads, for example, mean a good headset will be thrown away when fragile cabling fails. Perhaps the biggest life-span limitation stems from the non-replaceable batteries in mobile devices.
“The lifespan of a battery is not too long at the moment,” said Koh. “One way to address the problem would be to introduce flexible and swappable batteries so that when it is no longer fit for purpose you can upgrade to a new battery that lasts longer – it’s also an idea that’s been floated in the electric vehicle market.
“There should be robust technology put in place that would be adaptable to multiple models, not just one model of the car, or phone. The consumer has more choice and it would have a positive impact on device longevity.”
Companion devices also increasingly rely on batteries, providing another ongoing sales stream for manufacturers. Removing jack sockets for headphones, for example, means users become reliant on wireless devices with hard-toreplace batteries. “The AirPod is the perfect example of that, where Apple is maximising profit by selling a product with a battery that’s glued in – there’s no way for people to replace the battery and the AirPods give up after 18 months or two years,” said Wiens.
There are also concerns that AirPods – and similar devices from rivals – cannot go into e-waste recycling because the lithium batteries can’t be easily removed, leading to problems with the recycling stream.
“This is a crazy expensive set of headphones that only work for two years,” he said, adding that some within Apple shared his concerns. “I’ve been at conferences and talked with some of Apple’s environmental people and they kind of hang their heads. They know they have a problem.”
Apple proclaims widespread use of recycled materials and says two-thirds of all devices returned through Apple Trade In are reused, but the company hasn’t responded to a request for information about whether AirPods are simply jettisoned once their batteries die.
It’s not a subject the industry likes to discuss.
Even the biggest companies, who potentially have the resources to support their products, don’t