At last Saturday’s meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub we discussed the idea of “designed for the dump” as presented by Annie Leonard and her band as part of The Story of Electronics.
The premise is that manufacturers design for the dump – they build products which are designed to be thrown away after a year so that we have to buy new products and therefore generate more money for the corporations.
There could well be a lot of truth behind this, but as Tim Minchin’s The Fence says, “it’s not quite as simple as that.”
Products don’t just have an 18-month life cycle. If you’re anything like me you won’t have binned those old phones, you’ll have passed them down to friends or colleagues who just wanted an old phone because they’re not bothered about having the latest gadget. I can personally testify that the CWF office is fully kitted out with hand me down electronics.
The idea of the evil corporations is always a contentious one too. Corporations are by their very nature amoral – neither moral nor immoral, because they’re not living creatures and don’t think for themselves.
It’s somewhat naive to think that electronics used to be modular and replaceable and aren’t anymore. Desktop computers are a great example of this – you still upgrade and swap in and out components, and indeed can do with laptops too (less adding stuff, but certainly replacing specific broken components). But the fact is that back in the day computers had valves in that you would just swap out, these days the transistors on your computer’s CPU are too small for the human eye to see.
Luckily though we are already moving towards greener electronics. Compared to a decade ago there are all kinds of greener ways of doing things – all your components go to sleep when they’re inactive for example, cutting power consumption and therefore saving energy. In part, some of this innovation has been driven by designed for the dump – when you replace your electronics every 18 months, it means the companies have to come up with something smaller, lighter, more powerful and more green in a year and a half.
Don't have time to check my blog? Get a weekly email with all the new posts. This is my personal blog, so obviously it is 100% spam free.
Tags: electronics, Leeds Skeptics, story of stuff
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Humanism, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.