E-waste fastest-growing waste stream in the world
With summer vacation in full swing, many school districts are already sprucing up campuses in preparation for the next school year.
For some districts, that revamp includes tossing piles of Chromebooks with fully functioning hardware into the trash or recycling bin.
The Google laptops are popular with schools and families due their simplicity and low price. But Chromebooks also come with a built-in “death date,” when software support ends.
And once that date hits, the devices no longer receive updates needed to, say, run security programs or access state testing websites, which essentially renders them useless for students and teachers.
More than a dozen Chromebook models will hit their death dates in three months unless Google voluntarily steps in to extend them.
The end also is nigh for tons of Chromebooks that school districts shelled out millions for in 2020, when they were scrambling to help students go fully remote during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It creates an incredible amount of electronic waste, which is now the fastestgrowing waste stream in the entire world. And it’s incredibly costly to schools,” said Sander Kushen of Laguna Beach, who’s working with the California chapter of the nonprofit Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG, on a campaign to extend the life of all Chromebooks.
The campaign is part of a much larger, multipronged effort by PIRG and other environmental groups that hope to reduce electronic waste.
Humans generate more than 50 million tons of ewaste each year, according to the latest report on the topic from the United Nations, and just 17% of it gets recycled.
The report notes that in recent years the volume of e-waste has been skyrocketing while the percentage that gets recycled has actually dropped.
The most significant electronics-related climate harm happens long before products end up in landfills or incinerators anyway, Kushen noted. Many contain precious metals that come from environmentally damaging mining efforts. And they often are assembled and shipped around the world before ending up in a classroom.
That’s why, even though a Google spokesperson noted via email that the company
is working to use more recycled materials and reduce emissions in manufacturing over time, environmental advocates insist the focus has to be on extending the life of existing electronics, and on getting consumers to stop treating those products as disposable.
“Keeping our stuff around for longer is the most sustainable electronics choice we can make,” said Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability for iFixit, which offers free guides and forums to help people repair devices.
And Chromebooks, in many ways, have become the poster child for this effort.
Extending death date
To keep Google’s proprietary operating system running smoothly, the company automatically sends out software updates for Chromebooks every four to six weeks to add new features and improve device security.
When Google first introduced the affordable devices, in 2011, those updates would stop after just three years.
The company has “worked diligently” to extend the window for that Automatic Update Expiration several times as newer models hit the market, a spokesperson pointed out in an emailed statement, with the latest Chromebooks now guaranteed support for eight years.
However, the clock for Chromebook’s death date starts when the laptops are made rather than when they’re purchased.
That means customers might unwittingly buy devices that have been sitting on virtual shelves for some time and are set to “expire” much sooner — particularly if they’re buying used or refurbished laptops. Some Chromebooks now listed for sale are set to expire in just a few months, Kushen pointed out. And among the models in use, he noted, “the average (death) date is only four years away according to Google’s own website.”
With such a big wave of expiring Chromebooks looming, at a time when schools are struggling with issues such as teacher shortages and declining enrollment, Kushen said PIRG wants to see Google step up and voluntarily extend the death date window on existing models for several more years.
It’s been done before. In fall 2019, for example, the company added a year or more to device expiration dates for many models already on the market.
Google said in its emailed statement that they send updates for older devices to “continue to function in a secure and reliable manner until their hardware limitations make it extremely difficult to provide updates.”
But Kushen said his team has talked with technicians who are skeptical about fixed expiration dates for all Chromebook models. He cited an interview with Justin Millman, a repair technician who estimates he services 5,000 devices for schools a month. Millman told them “the hardware hasn’t changed all that much in seven years” and called the fixed death dates “arbitrary.”