There was little to love about my old phone with its cracked screen and dodgy sound. But I still missed its Appleness. One member of tech support (aka son number two) had words of consolation. He reckons that us saddo iPhoners were buying into planned obsolescence and components designed to keep everything in the Apple family. Seems you don’t get to be the world’s most valuable company by prioritising the electronic waste your business model creates.
So bite me, Apple. I’m over you. A Fairphone 3 arrived with a tiny screwdriver (which I have, of course, lost). But even without it I can lift the back off the phone like a tight Tupperware lid and access the battery, camera, speaker and other modules to replace if they break. It’s all nicely empowering, making me a little bit MacGyver and my phone more of a keeper than a stepping stone to the next edition.
A kite’s tail of spent smartphones isn’t just an expensive habit to trail in our digital wake. There is also the toxic slick that oozes from e-waste.
Guiyu, a Chinese town in Guangdong province, became known as the electronic graveyard of the world. End of life for the tech pouring out of rich countries meant an army of recyclers hunched over coal stoves burning soldered components off circuit boards. Toxins leached into rivers. The rate of stillbirths, cancer clusters and lead in children’s bodies rose horribly.
China banned the trade in the early 2000s but an informal market continued in unregulated pockets. Since then China has gone from being the biggest recycler of e-waste to the world’s largest source of it.
The Index of Repairability might sound like a new Jenny Offill novel but it’s a sticker required by law in France on electronic products (including lawnmowers) since January. It’s a 0-10 point system colour coded with a spanner and cog icon. The Fairphone 3 scores an 8.7 out of 10, which is as good as any smartphone gets on the scale.
Repairers
We get recycling but lag as repairers, which is where we will evolve to in a proper circular economy system. A new record of over 10kg of e-waste per head of population was recycled in Ireland last year. Last July WEEE Ireland (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment recycling) collected 3,763 tonnes of electrical waste, the biggest monthly amount in its 16-year history. The equivalent of 46 million used AA batteries rattled into recycling bins for our locked down year of gaming and streaming.
The three “R”s of “reduce, reuse, recycle” have at least another two rungs that can save us money and resources: repair and recharge. repairmystuff.ie is a handy place to start. Ikea’s four AA rechargeable batteries cost €7 and a plug in charger another €7.
Catherine Cleary is the co-founder of Pocket Forests
