Reduce E-waste || Save Money

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Electronics & The Environment

Money Saving Electro-economics

Electronic waste or e-waste is a serious problem. When an electrical appliance is thrown away, the energy used to manufacture it is lost. Not only that, but a lot of our e-waste gets shipped abroad and becomes the problem of developing countries. E-recycling itself is an energy and labour intensive process using carcinogenic chemicals. It is also quite ineffective, for instance, less than 1% of heavy metals used to manufacture an iPhone are reclaimed in a usable state.

So what can you do to reduce electronic waste and reduce the the amount we spend on electronics?

In this longish multi-part post (sorry) I’ll explore what we can do.

Sections:

1. Buy Thoughtfully
2. Don't Bin, Upgrade
3. Repair Rather Than Replace
4. Repurpose
5. As a Last Resort, Recycle

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1. Buy Thoughtfully

The first question when buying an e-appliance is "Do I really need it?". Many gadgets are sold with very clever marketing campaigns which are designed to make it feel like you will be missing out in some way if you don't make that purchase. These marketing campaigns exploit the 'fear of missing out' (FOMO) to manipulate people into buying products.

If you like the concept a gadget is "selling", is there are way to get the same benefit with hardware you already own, or by using hardware available on the second hand market? Perhaps you can consolidate your devices, so that a device your buy replaces many you already own, reducing the number of electronic appliances you are replacing on a periodic basis?

Does having the latest "upgrade" enhance your life to the extent that a it is worth both the environmental and financial costs? If a phone is going out of contract, perhaps you can make a good saving by moving to a SIM only contract?

When you feel a purchase is justified – think about how long that product is expected to last. When buying a computer, is it worth buying one with a specification that exceeds your current needs so that it will have a longer useful lifetime?

Be careful of 'smart' devices that rely on proprietary cloud services. Try and find out, how much functionality the device will retain if the cloud service is withdrawn by the provider. Are there any alternative products on the market that have flashable firmware or use open standards?

With gadgets that run software, like phones, routers and even smart television sets,  try and find out how long that gadget will receive software updates for, so that it remains secure. This is especially important with Android based phones.

Premium products often have lower failure rates. This is especially true of laptops and smart phones. Budget devices, for example, have plastic structural components where their more expensive counterparts have metal structural components. This makes them much more resilient to damage. Be aware that some expensive products are expensive because they are "new tech" and the manufacturers need to cover their research and design costs. Sometimes, being an early adopter of new technology, does not make good financial sense.

If you plan on buying PC, perhaps desktop PC could be considered instead of a Laptop. You could even look at buying the components and building a desktop PC yourself. This affords three major advantages:

1. You will have the understanding you need to upgrade or replace hardware components in future
2. The PC you build will be made of standard components, which means when the time comes to replace them, you can use readily available off-the-shelf parts. Some of the major manufacturers use bespoke motherboard designs and power supplies with unique power connectors making it impossible to use generic replacement parts for these items
3. You can customise the PC to meet your needs. For example, if you want a silent PC, you can pick out a suitable case, power supply, CPU cooler and fans

When buying a laptop, look at a business grade machine. Business grade laptops are generally better built, easier to repair and often more upgradable with socketed rather than soldered components.

A used business grade machine can make more sense than a new consumer grade machine. Look for the Dell and HP Outlet Stores for budget friendly refurbished equipment. See if you can find companies reselling business machines which have gone ‘off lease’. If buying used equipment, always check the sellers reputation and try and obtain a machine with at least 3 months warranty (that should be long enough for any problems to come to light).

Single board computers and ultra small form factor computers have become increasingly popular in recent years because they are small and discrete, yet pack enough computing power for most users. They tend to be more energy efficient than there desktop counter parts and because they are small, use less raw material in their manufacture - although there is still a significant environmental cost in their manufacture due to all the components squeezed onto their tiny boards.

For some people as Raspberry Pi 4/Pi 400 will provide a cost effective computer, which with its simpler design, has a lower environmental impact. Raspberry Pis can also easily be repurposed for an large range of uses.

If you can find the data, take into account manufacturers reliability records. In 2009 HP were the biggest seller of laptops in the USA, yet their laptops had the highest rate of hardware failure within 3 years of ownership. Some warranty companies publish repair data online.

Try and choose manufacturers with commitments to producing simpler (easier to recycle) devices and to using reclaimed materials in their manufacturing process.

Remember the usual due diligence with any potential purchase, for example, checking customer reviews and/or asking for recommendations from friends and of course, finding out about power consumption and running costs.

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2. Don't Bin, Upgrade

If you have a device that is getting a bit long-in-the-tooth like a smart phone, laptop or desktop, is it possible for you to upgrade it and give it a new lease of life?

This section looks takes a high-level look at upgrading PCs. More detailed articles on each section may follow, if there is interest.

Many desktop PCs, all-in-one computers and laptops built since 2010 or so are still worth upgrading in order to extend the useful life of them. Some older PCs too can be upgraded but how worthwhile will depend on how it is used. Computers built before 2000 and some low end machines built since then will be a bit more specialist and beyond the scope of this guide. That is not to say they cannot be made useful again.

Upgrading an older PC need not be expensive because many upgrade components can be sourced cheaply from online auction sites and car boot style apps. As always with second hand purchases, take the usual precautions.

There are three main components in a PC that can be upgraded. These are:

1. Storage (Hard Disk Drive/HDD)
2. Memory (Random Access Memory/RAM)
3. Processor (Central Processing Unit/CPU)

There are of course other components that can be upgraded too, including Graphics Cards (or Graphics Processing Units/GPUs) and Wi-Fi adapters.

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2.1 Hard Disk Drive (HDD) Upgrades

Almost every PC manufactured after 2005 (+/- 1 year) would benefit from having its HDD replaced with a Solid-state drive (SSD).

A traditional hard disk, when you take it a part, resembles a record player. It will have one or more spinning disks (platters) and a read-write head on a mechanical arm that resembles a stylus and a tone arm. In order to read or write data to the disk, that arm has to move into the right position so that the read-write head can be used to read or write the requested data from the disk. It takes several milliseconds to locate the head in the correct position to start reading or writing the data. On a fragmented disk, one file can have many parts written out in many locations, which means a great deal of time is lost on each read request moving the head into the correct position.

An SSD, by contrast, has no moving parts inside which means, immediately, there is no delay whilst components are moved to allow a read (or write) to happen.

Further more, an HDD overall read and write speed is restricted by how quickly the platters can be rotated. In many consumer drives, the platters spin at 5000, 5900 or 7200 revolutions per minute. The overall bandwidth of an HDD is restricted by the maximum width of a "track" on the spinning platter, which of course is constrained by the geometry involved.

An SSD, not limited by these restrictions, cannot only respond faster to read and write requests but it can also read or write much more data in a given length of time.

Putting an SSD in a desktop or laptop is a bit like adding a turbo charger, in terms of the performance improvement it can make. Even older Apple Macbooks and Apple iMacs can be upgraded in this way. I strongly recommend referring to an online fix-it guide for your model of Apple computer first.

If you take the plunge and upgrade an HDD to an SSD, a complete reinstall of your operating system and applications rather than than a clone of the old hard disk drive provides an opportunity for some quality house keeping. Don't forget to properly backup your data first.

One final point in this section; Some low end and some ultra-portable laptops will have storage soldered onto the main board (usually SSD NAND or its less well off relative, eMMC).

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2.2 Memory Upgrades

SSDs can really boost a computers performance, by increasing the speed of reads and writes of data from non-volatile storage. They reduce the cost, in performance terms, of storing (and reading back) data.

Non-volatile storage, such as that provided by hard disk and solid-state drives, is storage in which data can persist after the storage is deprived of power (turned off).

What is called 'memory' in computers is volatile storage. This is storage in which data cannot survive when the storage is deprived of power. Every time you turn a computer off, as the electrical charge from the memory dissipates, so does the data stored in that memory.

You could ask; why bother with memory at all in computers, given its volatile nature? Surely it would be simpler to write all the data programs need to an SSD and have programs read the data back from the SSD when they need it?

At the moment, memory in computers is still a lot faster than even the fastest SSDs. Even with an SSD, disk I/O is relatively expensive performance wise. This is why the operating system, applications and data are loaded into memory as they are used. After the initial load into memory, operations are much faster. Of course the gap is narrowing as SSDs become more sophisticated and developments like Intel Optane have already arrived on the market, just starting to blur the gap between traditional storage and memory.

The ultimate question here however, is how much memory is needed? And the answer is that it depends.

If there is too little memory in a computer, relative to what is asked of it, then it is going to perform more slowly and some processes will become very sluggish as they read and write more from the SSD because they can't keep the data they frequently access in memory. Some applications and processes may even fail because they cannot allocate the memory they need.

Too much memory in a computer means can go unused, which means wasting money and wasting the earth's resources.

As a general guide, a Windows 10 system will work with 2 gigabytes (GB) of memory, or even 1 GB on 32-bit systems. This doesn't leave much headroom for applications once the operating system and its essential services are loaded into memory. At 3 or 4 GB things are looking much better.

Older computers will support a maximum of 2 or maybe 4 GB of memory. You will need to check the manufacturer's specifications. These systems are probably not worth spending too much money on in-terms of upgrading, unless you are prepared to look at lighter weight operating systems now or in the future. That said, at 4 GB an SSD upgrade combined with the tricks of Windows memory management will help ensure an older computer has enough performance for most peoples basic general use.

The memory sweet spot for most people and most workloads is going to be around 8GB. This will support browsing the Internet with many tabs open and simultaneously running some chunkier applications.

With memory upgrades, it is very important to check manufacturers specifications to get memory that is going to be compatible with your computer.

Some low end, single board or ultra-portable devices my have their memory soldered on and may not be upgradable.

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2.3 CPU Upgrades

The Microprocessor or Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the marvel inside the computer responsible for processing all of the instructions the operating system or applications asked of it. Each line of code that is executed result in one or more instructions being processed by the CPU.

CPU performance can be measured in instructions per second (or IPS). Faster CPUs generally process more instructions per second, but it is not as simple as looking at the clock speed when comparing CPUs from different families, as techniques such as pipelining and speculative execution can increase the number of instructions per second a CPU can achieve. New generations of CPU often introduce new instruction sets which can further improve the efficiency of certain operations.

Newer CPUs tend to be built using smaller "processes" increasing efficiency because electrons have less distance to travel and also reducing power consumption. That said, recent generations of Intel CPU have all been built using a 14 nanometre process, so optimisations have been brought about in other ways.

If you have a lower or mid-range computer with a socketed rather than soldered on CPU, then in addition to the previously mentioned upgrades, you might be able to get a significant increase in performance with a CPU upgrade.

CPU upgrades can add cores. Multicore architecture CPUs are in fact multiple processors in the same package. This means the CPU can work on more instructions simultaneously, boosting a computers ability to handle multi-tasking or modern multi-threaded workloads.

CPU upgrades can also increase clock speeds (the number of processor cycles per second) which allows a CPU to get more work done in a given time.

As with storage and memory upgrades, some single board computers, laptops, netbooks, all-in-one will have a soldered on CPU which is not itself upgradable.

You will also need to refer to manufacturers instructions/specifications for compatibility. Some motherboards support more than one generation of CPU, but may need a BIOS or firmware upgrade to support newer CPU generations.

A more powerful CPU will generate more heat and may require a more substantial cooling solution.

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2.4 Other Computer Upgrades

Having covered the main points, there are some other possible upgrades or additions to a computer that may extend its working life, although by now it is all starting to bit “triggers broom”. However, by buying second-hand components rather than new ones, you are improving the second-hand market and promoting reuse of existing components rather than allowing the binning of them or directly stimulating the manufacture and consequential pollution of using new components.

If you do a lot of video editing and encoding, photo editing with tools that support graphics acceleration, or light/retro gaming then adding or upgrading a graphics card (or GPU) will enhance performance.

Some video cards require extra power, cooling and considerable space so you will need to ensure these requirements are met. You will need a video card that your motherboard/machine can support – check the specification of the PCIe slots available.

Another potential upgrade is the Wi-Fi adapter, in order to take advantage of newer Wi-Fi standards. Video card additions and upgrades apply in the main to desktops, however wireless cards on laptops are often discrete interchangeable components. With laptops, in terms of mileage and support, your mileage will vary. In some cases adding a USB adapter will be the easier, if less neat solution. USB 2 supports a maximum transfer rate lower than that of recent WiFi standards in optimum conditions.

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2.5 Alternative Operating  Systems

An older machine running a Windows version other than Windows 10 poses a security risk. It should either be upgraded to Windows 10 or switched out for an alternative, currently maintained, operating system.

The good news is, computers running fully activated versions of Windows 7 or later can be upgraded to Windows 10, free of charge.

Machines running Windows XP or Vista will need a Windows Licence and activation key. It is possible to use an evaluation version of Windows for up to 90 days. This is meant for trialling and testing Windows 10 and Microsoft intends for it to be used by IT professionals. It can however be useful for checking how well your computer system works with Windows 10, but be aware you will need to reinstall and activate Windows 10 upon expiry of the 90 day trial.

Another option is to buy a second hand Windows license, but be aware these should be retail and not OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) licence keys as those are not meant to be transferred from the original piece of equipment they were supplied with.

Microsoft officially says any device that shipped with Windows 8 should run Windows 10. In reality Windows 10 will install on a lot of systems that predate Windows 8 - there is even 32-bit installation media still available. There is a higher liklehood with older computers, that some components will not have signed directly compatible drivers available. This can often be worked around courtesy of Windows 7 compatibility mode.

For computers that don't meet the Windows 10 requirements and also for users who don't want to pay for proprietary software, find the telemetry in Windows 10 too intrusive or simply prefer Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), then there are viable alternatives to running Windows, including operating systems based on GNU/Linux and BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution).

I have been using Linux personally and professionally for nearly a decade, for everything from hosting email and database servers through to web conferencing and video editing.

Small distributions like Puppy Linux are designed for older computers and have the most modest of system requirements. Fuller fat distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu will still run well enough on lots of older machines too. Using Linux can give a new lease of life to an older computer and ultimately keep it out of landfill.

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3. Repair Rather Than Replace

This is an important tenet of reducing electronic waste, and applies to a broad range of appliances including computers. Reducing demand for new goods and the environmental cost of their manufacture means making existing goods last longer.

An increasing number of electronic appliances have community provided fix-it guides and videos online, as well as specialist suppliers providing replacement parts. Obviously, with mains powered equipment, care needs to be taken to ensure they are isolated from the electrical supply before doing any maintenance work and that all fuses, insulation and terminals are in good condition.

Some items, like pressure washers and lawnmowers and even vacuum cleaners can be very simple to repair. Often times, drive belts or bushes on motors need replacing, usually at minimal expense.

More complicated pieces of domestic machinery often have interchangeable components that are easily slotted out and slotted back in.

In the last few years, I have replaced a heating element on an oven, replaced a split intake hose on a dishwasher, freed up a stuck valve on a pressure washer, replaced several belts on a lawn mower and changed brushes on a washing machine. This has usefully extended the service life of all these items.

Tackling repairs on simple items can inspire confidence to take on more involved repairs.

As electronic appliances become more complicated and technology companies tighten their grip on supply chains, availability of repair information and ability of third parties to fill gaps in the repair market, it is important that we collectively uphold the right to repair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronics_right_to_repair.

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4. Repurpose

Sometimes a device, albeit a desktop, laptop or smart phone is simply unable to keep up with the demands of modern software.

A smart phone may not have the latest security updates available making it insecure to use on you main network with other trusted devices or outside the home. You could turn that phone into a device for music steaming, an endpoint for a smart home assistant or an IP camera using free and open source software.

An old laptop or other low power computer might not be up to everyday desktop computing, but it might work well as a home automation server or a server providing network services such as file sharing.

An old desktop with spare drive bays could be turned into a network attached storage server with FreeNAS/TrueNAS.

In fact, there are lots of open source applications available to turn old devices into something useful and sometimes the limit is our own imaginations.

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5. As a Last Resort, Recycle

Sometimes we have to accept that the time has come and a gadget becomes redundant, too expensive to repair or simply just not powerful enough to accomplish the things we are asking of it. There are a few options open at the point to prevent that device from winding up in landfill.

A device that is redundant maybe useful to someone else. Local schemes may exist for taking broken or redundant devices and salvaging parts to repair other devices before handing them out to people in desperate need.

Broken things can even sometimes attract a surprising amount of interest on the second hand market from people actively hunting for spare parts to repair their own gadgets. In the worse case scenario, I have never struggled to find an interested party in local Freegle/Freecycle groups.

Some manufacturers offer buyback and voucher programs in return for goods that they then recycle, which can make good money-saving sense. However, the recycling is seldom as green as manufacturers would have you think, so this environmentally has to be among the last resorts.

Don't put electronic waste (and batteries) in the bin where it will end up polluting the environment with heavy metals and chemicals like cadmium leeching into the soil. Local authorities will have schemes for handling e-waste.

If you are worried about the personal data you have stored on devices, there are utilities like DBAN which run on computers to overwrite all data on a disk with zeros or random data. This will prevent all but the most forensic data recovery from retrieving your personal data. SSDs have special instructions baked into them for erasing their content and will require manufacturing tools or HDDErase to issue a 'reset' command.