Friends, I’ve written about the “right to repair” several times on this blog. Most recently, I dredged up an article from 2018 where I talk about that very issue. I talk about it because I think about it. I think about it because I’ve been using consumer electronics now for about 50 years, that is if you count my Donald Duck record player. And every so often, in the middle of the night, I’m struck with the very real fact that every piece of consumer gear I’ve ever owned is still out there somewhere.
Until the mid-2000s it was not only legal but normal to just put old consumer electronics in the trash. Presumably that stuff went to landfills. Because it’s mostly plastic and silicon, it’s still there in largely recognizable form today. This means, much to my shame, that there’s a trail of old stuff going all across the country and it all used to belong to me.
It almost makes me wish I’d kept everything, no matter how trivial, just so I could know how much of it there has been. This particular clip from Season 9 of The Big Bang Theory illustrates how that would work:
One good reason to hold onto old stuff
The first and best reason to hold on to old stuff is that it may one day be valuable. Every couple of weeks I get bored and look on eBay for something I once owned. Every so often I run into something that would actually still be worth real money if I had it. But I admit that most of the stuff I owned is not terribly interesting, and there’s no market for it. Still, I think we’ve all had that moment where we’ve thought, “if only I’d held on to my…” and certainly I have too.
The AirPods problem
Quite a few years ago, I won a contest where the prize was a brand new pair of first generation AirPods. I still have them, and the battery life isn’t terrible. Honestly I don’t need them to have more than an hour of two of life generally speaking. But, I also have a much newer pair of AirPods that sound better, last longer, and have cool features. Both pairs are sitting on my desk. I’ll use the older ones for video calls during the day so I don’t run down the battery on my other ones. But, I can tell that the old AirPods are going to fail at some point.
They’ll fail because the non-replaceable batteries in them won’t work anymore. I’m far from the first person to talk about this. The seminal article on the subject, the one everyone links to, is from 2019. In the meantime, I guess there are some shops which have figured out how to replace those batteries but it’s a pretty time-consuming process. It’s never going to be terribly cost effective.
At least with the original AirPods, the battery was in the stalk so it was theoretically possible to reach it. CT scans of AirPods Pro 2 like the one at the top of this article have been circulating for a while.
What they show is that the battery is located in the top part, and that it’s literally surrounded by electronics. This makes it essentially utterly impossible to replace even if you could open the things up (which you can’t.)
Headed for the boneyard
And that means sooner or later, close to 100% of the over 300 million individual AirPods that have been sold will end up in recycling centers or landfills. Actually recycling them isn’t going to be easy. If you really want to get a meaningful return on your recycling investment, you need to separate out the metal from the plastic before you start. Even better, you should separate out the toxic stuff like lead from the non-toxic stuff like gold and silicon. But none of that is possible with AirPods. When they’re recycled, if they’re recycled, they’ll be melted at a temperature where the plastic and lead fall off but other metals stay put. This is a very inefficient way of recycling and it leads to a lot of toxic waste.
We really need to figure out how to address this.
Apple spends a lot of time and effort telling you how they’re working on being carbon-neutral and making everything it can out of recycled materials. And yet, unless there’s something they haven’t told us, they’re still producing millions of tons of stuff that can’t be recycled easily. There is, apparently, a huge amount of technology in AirPods. The engineering is amazing and that’s why they work so well. But it seems like none of that engineering is going toward end-of-life options for them. If nothing else, the plastic cases should be created in such a way that a special tool could remove them. That would if nothing else allow the plastic to go one way and the metal to go another. And that’s a start.
In the meantime though, I have to simply say that this stuff keeps me up at night. Does it keep you up at night?
