Not Tomorrow’s War

Yes, the globe is warming up. No, don’t trust Trump on this.

Yes, there are multiple efforts to counter climate change. No, they aren’t doing enough. But at least there is widespread acknowledgement of the scale of disastrous effects of climate change and remedial steps are being purported.

Global warming is already upon us. News bulletins shout out “never before” droughts, rains and floods from time to time. There is something that is still in a nascent stage, that might have just as deleterious effects as global warming. Am talking about electronic waste.

E-waste is piling up, quite literally, in dump yards. The Global E-waste Statistics Partnership (GESP), which counts the UN and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as founding members, predicts e-waste will reach 74 metric tonnes in ten years, double the number in 2014.

The problem is deep rooted

Accelerating pace of electronics in our day to day lives is a natural reason but inability of consumers to repair existing devices compounds this problem. Washing machines, TVs, earphones/headphones, mobile phones, speaker systems, ACs etc. are simply put – hard to repair today. There is a dearth of both spare parts and skilled technicians. And no, consumer companies aren’t helping. They are further compounding this problem by not only making spares and repairs scarce but also by “planned obsolescence” of devices.

No, you don’t need to “blast past fast” by impulsively buying an iPhone 12 when you already have a perfectly functioning smartphone. With planned obsolescence on one hand and increasing consumerism on the other, the problem compounds further.

All is not Lost

The UK has brought in a law - “Right to Repair”. The law requires manufacturers to make spare parts available to consumers, so that they wouldn’t have to throw out a good product just because a screw is not unavailable in the market (Yes, the screw is an exaggeration).

On somewhat similar lines, US President Biden has signed an order that essentially makes way for products to be repaired by third-party providers. Did you read the piece where a YouTuber fixed a Tesla for $700 when the company quoted $16,000 for the fix? What a joke.

It is time backroom efforts on e-waste are given their fair share of the spotlight globally. The tricky aspect is e-waste management is not just about recycling discarded goods, it needs a tectonic shift in the entire consumer landscape, which is easier said than done. But tackling e-waste is not tomorrow’s war, it is today’s.