E-waste is on the rise in Canada, here’s why you should care

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This is a CBC podcast.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast.

Most of us use something electronic every single day.

You're probably using something right now.

To listen to me, whether it's a cell phone or a laptop, maybe something larger,

like a dishwasher or a TV, we are surrounded by technology that is useful to us,

until it stops working, or until we want a newer, better, shinier version of said technology.

We ask people in downtown Vancouver what they do with their old electronics,

and how often they trade in for a new model.

Fones and laptops, I usually send them back to Rogers when my phone is up,

or sell them on Facebook Marketplace.

Well, my previous phone was taking pretty bad pictures, so I was not happy with the cameras,

so I bought a new one with a better camera.

I take it to the V-Pull. The V-Pull, yeah, to recycle it, yeah.

Like the TV, things like that, yes.

Oh, I don't really get rid of them. I put them in a drawer.

I probably have seven phones in a drawer in my storage space.

I would say most electronics are just going in the garbage, and maybe that displays my ignorance,

and how they're actually supposed to be disposed of.

Usually four to five years, or four phone, and

same for the PC as well, or MacBook.

I just throw them away.

Just throw them away.

New research found that almost two-thirds of the electronic devices, the Canadians,

are throwing away, are actually still in working condition.

Kamal Habib is an associate professor in the School of Environment,

Enterprise, and Development at the University of Waterloo.

She was the co-lead author of this study, and she is in Waterloo, Ontario.

Kamal, good morning.

Good morning.

Do you have a drawer full of old phones that you used to use that now you don't?

I would confess, yes, I do have at least one extra phone.

Confession is good for the soul.

What is e-waste? We'll get to the research in a moment, but what is e-waste?

So e-waste is a short for electronic waste.

This is the term we use for all the unwanted, broken, or obsolete items that are powered

either by plug or by the battery.

And what happens with our e-waste?

We heard that one person say that he keeps his laptop on his phone for a couple of years,

and then just throws them away.

So, many things happen with the e-waste, actually.

The one thing is obviously, once we are done with our products,

it doesn't matter if the products are still functional, if they are okay,

if they are not broken at all, we still tend to just get rid of them,

and then go for the newer, shinier product.

And the good thing is that not all the electronic waste is just ending up in the landfills,

that's a very misconception.

There are so many drop-off stations, and people usually should and would go there to drop

off their e-waste items.

So, and then those drop-off stations would be sending that e-waste to different pre-processing

facilities within the regions who would then, or who should, actually, then test those items

to see if they are broken or they are functioning.

If they are functioning, they should be sent to the second hand market,

and if they are not, then they should be recycled,

and the valuable resources should be recovered out of them.

What did you learn in your research about how often we are replacing our technology,

and why we're getting rid of things and upgrading?

So, we actually ran a series of studies just to understand the consumer behavior in Canada.

Some three years ago, we did publish our very first ever comprehensive estimate of e-waste

in Canada. Before that study, actually, there were no numbers about electronic waste in Canada.

So, in that study, we provided an estimate for around 198 electronic items in our households.

Would you imagine that you have that many items in your house?

So, by 2020, our estimate did show that an average Canadian would be responsible for

throwing away around 25 kilograms of e-waste.

We were shocked by that number, and we wanted to dig deeper into the number and see,

okay, why this is happening?

And then we did, in this very current study that you were referring to,

what we did was that we did survey 800 households in Canada, across Canada, actually,

in nine provinces. We then baked the seven most used items in our households.

For example, phones, computers, tablets, laundry appliances, microwave ovens,

like this kind of items. And then what we figured out was that almost two-third of these items

were thrown away even when they were fully functional. There was no problem with them,

like no issues, and they were still like, people got rid of them.

Another important finding of our recent study was that almost 70% of the products that were

bought in Canada are bought brand new, and only 5% of the products that were bought in Canada

are bought as second-hand. So, that also speaks to the consumer behavior in Canada,

who really, really prefer going for the brand new items and don't go for the second-hand or

used items. These aren't cheap items. Why are we getting rid of things if they still work?

I think two things. So, it's very different from product to product. So, we did ask,

actually, our respondents, what were the reasons why you were throwing away your products,

and for the phones, it was very obvious they said that, because the new model came, and obviously,

it came with more features, right? You also might have noticed, like, the resolution of

cameras just keeps getting better every year, and there are a few more apps and for

few more functionalities added, and people just get attracted towards the newer product.

But for the laundry appliances, it wasn't the case laundry appliances, majority of the respondents

said that their product had some issues, but they didn't check for repair option if it was

repairable or not. For stories of people, it is one specific kind of technology with a printer,

that sometimes people will say that it is easier, cheaper, more efficient, just to buy an entire

new printer than it is to buy the cartridges that go into the printer. What do you make of that?

Very well said. This is a classic example of planned obsolescence. And since our study got

published two weeks ago, I have received enormous response from the Canadians,

telling me about their electronic items and what are the issues, and one particular email was

about these printers. Now, the interesting thing is that, yes, this is pretty much correct,

that repair tends up to be most often more expensive than buying a new product. And the

printer cartridges are the examples where they just ran out so quickly that in the long run,

if one has to do the cost-benefit analysis, it's just not economically feasible.

I had my personal experience also a few years back when I had a laptop, I won't say the name,

but the screen just got black, and I had to get it repaired. I went to the manufacturer or the

retailer, and they quoted me for the price, which was only $200 less than buying a new, and

guess what? Back then, I just went for the newer product, because I felt okay, the new item

is coming up with three years' warranty. Why should I just get my old product repaired with

only one year's warranty? So I believe, like most of the consumers would behave that way when

it comes to decision-making to go for repair or buying a new product. We went out onto the streets

of Vancouver and asking people whether or not they try to repair their devices before they get

rid of them and get a new version. I've listened to some of those people who they're wrestling with,

what you're wrestling with. The cost usually to repair something can be more expensive than

actually replacing it, unfortunately, so we want things working, and so instead of getting it fixed,

we go and buy something new. If it's cheaper to replace than to fix, then I recycle it and buy

anyone. My television usually replace them every five or six years just for a better quality,

but they haven't died. As for the phone, I do replace them every two years. It'll start to

not work as great as I would like it to. It will get so much so that I have to replace it, and

that's just part of having a phone by one of the major companies. Why aren't people, is it just

cost? Why aren't people repairing their technology? I think we all go through almost a similar

experience. Repair is just not that accessible, and repair just tends to be very expensive because

people usually have to go through the original manufacturer. That just ends up expensive, and my

feeling is that because there is no more competition between different service providers, maybe that

could be another reason. Availability of spare parts is also another problem that there is no

spare parts are not just readily available. On that not actually in Ontario, where recently a bill

is stable, it's bill 91, which is the right to repair act. I feel that this is a step in the right

direction because it actually requires manufacturers to provide repair metals to software updates and

replacement parts to consumers and independent repair shops. I feel that this bill, if it's passed,

it would really bring the cost down for the repair. Quebec has a similar right to repair law,

and the Manitoba government last week introduced right to repair legislation as well. Do you think

that that would force the manufacturers to make sure that if the thing that you have that still

works, but perhaps it has a flaw, can be repaired. If that can be repaired, that that would prevent us

from putting it in the landfill and buying something new. It will definitely, definitely if

manufacturers are bound by law to provide the manholes for the repairability, it should definitely

work. And you know, it would not only reduce the electronic waste in Canada, but also it would

add to so many environmental benefits. For example, we don't have to then produce so many

electronic items every year. We don't have to mine those valuable resources from like mining operations

and imagine all the environmental benefits that would happen if we just avoid all that mining

manufacturing processing refining, like all the value chain. And on that note, I wanted to highlight

another legislation which is not from Canada, but from France. Their government actually made all

the manufacturers who are selling the products in country in 2020 to provide a repairability index.

So it has to be pasted on the product if they have to sell it in the country. And they had to

rank it between 1 to 10. How repairable the product is when the consumers are going out and

to buy a product, they can make a decision based on like information that okay, if this product

is coming up with a score of 8 to 8 out of 10, it means that I can perhaps repair it myself also

in case of any minor issues. There's also you raised the issue of planned-off

celescence where you have something and it starts the battery maybe doesn't hold as long of a

charge that the screen doesn't look as good anymore that it feels like it's working sluggishly.

How does that fit into this conversation? We see it more and more often and unfortunately now it's

more common than ever. For example, you might have experienced with your own phone also that the new

software is just not being updated. Even though the phone was perfectly fine up until last night,

midnight and because that software couldn't update it, now it's just an obsolete item in my house

and I can't do anything about it. So planned-off celescence has a great role in in increasing our

electronic waste. What would you say just finally to somebody who they feel that temptation? They want

the nicer TV. They want the better watch. They want the newer phone. What would you say to

somebody who's thinking about upgrading one of their devices? So I would say that I don't go for any

new shiny object if your existing product is working fine. If you don't need, like most of us don't

even use all those more than two, three dozen apps on our phones, right? Some of the most common apps

are like calling, texting, camera, map, maybe and maybe two, three more. So we actually don't

need that many apps and I would just talk to my fellow consumers that if the product is functioning

fine, there is no reason and there should be no reason to replace it. But you understand that

temptation though that people see somebody else with the good phone and they think, well, I have to get

that. I do definitely see that and I would still like stick to what I said that if the product

is functioning and if we have to be responsible citizens, responsibility goes beyond the

society, it goes towards environment nature as well, right? And we would be doing so much better

for our future generations if we could save resources. And also to companies that if they could

design their products in a way that it's easier for repair because our new modern gadgets are so

sleek and so thin and so lightweight that it's nearly impossible actually to just open and replace

a battery you want to go on. Come on, I could just speak with you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Come on, Habib is an associate professor in the School of Environment,

Enterprise and Development at the University of Waterloo and the co-lead author

of a new study about consumer electronics and e-waste in Canada as she was in Waterloo, Ontario.

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Josh Leposky is a professor of geography at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. He studies

the geography and economics of electronic waste. He's the author of three books about that subject.

He's in St. John's. Josh, good morning to you.

I'm well aside from my mystery cabinet, which has untold numbers of folks and other things.

Where does our e-waste end up?

Well, as the previous guest was mentioning, if we're talking about Canada, then a lot of it

is collected. It doesn't actually go to landfills, but is collected by the industrial recycling

industry. And depending on its condition, the products will be either destroyed, shredded,

and sorted into their material components as best as that infrastructure can do.

Some amount of it may be tested for reuse and moved on to the secondary market as well.

How do we compare in this country when it comes to e-waste to other countries? How are we doing?

Like a lot of relatively wealthy countries, we have fairly high per capita e-waste generation.

You know, we compare with countries in the EU, US. Yeah, so we're sort of comparable to other

countries of similar per capita wealth. We heard come all offer her explanation. Why do you think

it is that we broadly will get rid of and buy a new version of something that is still working,

but we feel like we need something better? How do you understand that?

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of drivers of new purchase decisions. Some of that is

inevitably going to be personal desire. But I think electronics, even personal electronics,

is such a wide category of different devices that it can be a little bit hard to generalize,

even if we take our phones, which I think for at least for those of us who have them,

these kind of stand in for electronics writ large. And even if it's a personal device,

a lot of us have worked related apps on them, taking a personal example. My personal phone has

authentication apps on them that I have to use for my work. And I have just been told that

you know, an app for that has to be upgraded. And my phone is old enough that I cannot upgrade that

app. So I'm confronted with, do I get access to my work email or do I buy a new phone?

As I say, even though it's a personal device, I'm sort of in a sense forced into that purchase

decision. I'm not trying to discount, you know, the personal desire for new stuff as it were,

but there can be quite a range of different sort of motivators for getting a new device.

Fair enough. You've said that disposability is not an innate human practice. What did you mean by that?

Yeah, and so a lot of my work has looked at historically how products have changed or draws on

the researchers of historical, historical researchers that have looked at this. And when you look at

the actual history of consumption, there is a long history of teaching and training people who

as consumers to accept disposability. If anyone has seen the great Michael Keaton film, the founder

about the introduction of McDonald's to the world, there's a great scene early on in the movie

where he's standing in line at, you know, a burger joint that is sort of the first place to

offer takeaway fast, fast takeaway food. And he gets up to the counter and makes an order and

about 10 seconds later has his food in his hand and is just completely befuddled. He can't

understand. There's no cutlery. He doesn't know where to sit. At the whole point, I mean,

it's comedic on purpose, but the whole point of the scene is to demonstrate how literally within

living memory of some people, disposability was not a thing. You had to not only be taught to

consume in a certain way, but a whole bunch of infrastructure for eating, taking away the cutlery,

taking away the seating and so on and so forth had to happen such that disposable fast food becomes

the norm, right? And once it becomes normed in that sense, all sorts of other social changes

start to happen. We start ordering our time differently. Oh, I won't make breakfast at home.

I'll just do the drive through. You know, I no longer, but once that starts to happen, you know,

my whole schedule, as it were, changes. And not just as an individual, but with everyone I'm

related to my family, you know, my work, I won't make breakfast for the kids. We'll just all get it

on the way to school and work. So once certain patterns start to set in and the infrastructure that

used to help us pattern things differently gets taken away, it becomes more difficult to go

back as it were to the way things were and in respect to disposability. And the way things used to be

was, and perhaps instilled some regards, but if something broke, you fixed it or you figured out

how to fix it or you brought somebody in to fix it. And now you can't repair things. And so people

have to put in laws to say that you have a right to be able to repair something. Why is it easier to

repair our technology? Yeah, well, so when it comes to digital technology, a lot of that comes down to,

I would say, less the physics of the device and much more about changes to laws, especially around

intellectual property that have been going on for quite a while, but just to speak specifically

to the Canadian context, Canada passed intellectual property laws in order to get tariffry access to

the US market. This is back in the early 2000s and making it, for example, illegal to do what

people sometimes call jail breaking and electronic device, basically getting past technological

protection measures that would allow you to run other software on it and this kind of thing.

Now we had, as I say, we adopted that legislation for at the time what seemed like maybe the bigger

goal, which was to get tariff free access into the American market. Well, we can see where

that strategy has led us. The issue around repair could be mitigated quite substantially by

changes in the law that would, for example, not just guarantee people's rights repair, but make it

sort of not sort of decriminalizing some things that have been criminalized with these intellectual

property laws, because of the way they work benefit really large monopolistic American technological

companies. What would you want to see government do to address the waste? Are the policies that they

could put in part of them, perhaps, is addressing the right to repair, but are there other things

that governments could do to address us? For sure. I mean, looking upstream to, especially to

manufacturing is really important, just because this year volume of pollution rising in manufacturing

is so much larger than, if you will, at the end of the pipe when you and I get rid of our

devices, even if we manage to, you know, take care of post-consumer waste, the waste you and I,

or your previous guest was studying, so we managed to do that 100 percent. There'd still be

90 percent plus of the pollution left unaccounted for, so we really need to move that kind of

action upstream, and there's a large variety of ways that that might be done, but it basically comes

down to regulating pollution in manufacturing, to reduce it, to reduce volume, to reduce toxicity.

I'll let you go, but I want to go back to that idea that we're trained in some ways to think about

this. I walk out of the building that I'm in right now, and there are giant billboards that are

advertising some fancy new phone. My phone's fine, but I go out and I see that and I think, what am I

missing? Is it possible for us to develop at this point a more sustainable relationship with our

technology? I mean, certainly personal choices, you know, are in some sense within our control,

but you know, it's really a question of, you know, that your power as a consumer to change things

is extremely limited. You and I can walk in to look at that advertisement, go into a store and

look on the wall, and they're be confronted by, you know, a myriad number of makes and models,

but the underlying manufacturing conditions, the underlying sort of pollutant releases,

the labor conditions are so similar across all those makes and models that the idea of

shopping our way out of this problem is really a non-starter. So, I mean, you know, to sort of

put it on a t-shirt, the most environmental device you can get is the one you already have.

Are you going to have to get a new phone?

I'm going to try and avoid it. I haven't figured out quite yet, though I have downloaded my 10-3

multi-factor authentication tokens, so I've got at least 10 chances to try a different strategy.

It's always just interesting to hear the person who's studying this, have to actually live through

the thing that they are studying. Yes, indeed. It's part of the test. Josh, good to talk to you.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Josh Leposky is a professor of geography at Memorial University

of Newfoundland studies the economy of electronic waste. He's the author of three books about that

subject. He was in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. You've been listening to the current

podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.