Ending E-waste

This article was originally published on Circulate, the editorial site of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

By Rémy Le Moigne

Each household, in France, owns an average of a hundred pieces of electrical and electronic equipment. And this number will keep growing with home assistants, wireless headphones, virtual reality headsets or smart watches. Unfortunately, the more equipment we own, the more we trash. Waste electrical and electronic equipment is currently considered to be one of the fastest growing waste streams in the European union, growing at 3-5 % per year.

To recover high value materials from waste, the electronic and electrical equipment industry has massively invested in collection and recycling infrastructures. But today results are very disappointing: in Europe only 35 % of discarded e-waste is properly collected by formal recycling systems while the valuable rare elements are almost entirely lost during recycling.

The end-of-pipe approach, recycling end-of-usage products, cannot be the sole solution. The industry need to review the way electrical and electronic products are designed, manufactured, used and collected to keep them out of the waste stream.

Improve repairability

If buying a new appliance can be a customer friendly experience, having it repaired is a whole different story. Customers face many hurdles and frustrations: where to find an experienced and available technician; will spare parts still be available from the vendor; will the cost of repair not exceed the one of the new product?

Some customers have chosen to repair their equipment themselves. They are assisted either locally (by organisations such as the Restart Project in London or Repair Café across Europe) or by online platforms (iFixit or Spareka for instance). To address this growing demand, some vendors are improving the reparability of their products. By the end of 2017, Apple will finally roll-out its so-called Horizon Machine for mending cracked iPhone glass in about 400 authorized third-party repair centres in 25 countries.¹ Group SEB, a world leader in small household equipment, commits to the reparability of its products for 10 years. It manages a 15,000 m² storage warehouse dedicated to conserving nearly 5.7 million spare parts shipped to a network of 6,500 approved repair professionals in 60 countries. The company is considering using additive technology to produce some spare parts locally.

Spare parts needed for repair can be harvested from used products to improve their availability and reduce their cost. For example, 75 % of the spare parts used by Google to repair its data centre servers are used ones. According to a recent study, building an inventory of spare parts harvested from used device would be economically profitable. Part harvesting could also be made easier with new product design. For example, dissolvable circuit boards could help recover spare parts from IT equipment.

If repair may look as a small business opportunity, it is not: the sole mobile phone repair business generates about $ 4 billion in annual revenue.¹

Industrialise the refurbishing process

It makes no environmental sense to recycle an electronic appliance that can be reused. For instance, keeping a smartphone in use for an additional year cuts its CO₂ impact by 31 %. But it makes no economic sense either: a reused iPhone retains around 48% of its original value, whereas its value as recyclate is just 0.24%. Various players, from start-ups to large manufacturers, are collecting, refurbishing and reselling used equipment to capture this remaining value. Refurbished products usually undergo a rigorous process that includes testing, replacing defective modules or parts, cleaning and repackaging. For example, Dyson, HP, Dell and Lenovo sell refurbished equipment on dedicated outlet web sites. IBM Global Asset Recovery Services has been refurbishing used IT equipment for 30 years. Envie in France or Norsk Ombruk in Norway restore large domestic appliances.

But what has long been seen as a niche market is becoming today an opportunity of its own. The market for used smartphones, for instance, is expected to grow from 81 to 223 million units between 2015 and 2020, representing a staggering compound annual growth rate of 22%. To capture a share of this market, some players are investing in industrial facilities to refurbish high volumes of used products. GameStop has invested in a 17,000 m² site to refurbish game consoles. Apple is working on an automated disassembly system with the ability to disassemble 1.2 million iPhone units per year. Anovo has operations in 11 countries to refurbish various devices from touch screen tablet devices to triple play set top boxes.

Unfortunately, reuse has its limits. With their existing designs, appliances, even refurbished, cannot always match the performances of new ones. For example, with the recent efficiency improvements of heat pump systems, buying a new refrigerator should sometime be preferred to reusing an old one.

Sell appliance as a service

But probably the most promising model to keep equipment out of the waste steam is not to sell the appliances but the service they provide. Professional customers already have access to such services: offices can buy copies per page from Xerox, light per lux from Philips, compute capacity by the hour from Amazon. Professional laundries can pay per use for their Electrolux washing machines. But only a few start-ups are providing such services to end consumers. For example, in the Netherlands, Bundles offers pay-per-wash services to customers and charges customers a monthly subscription fee on a per-wash basis. As part of the service, Bundles takes care of the washing machine installation and maintenance, and retains ownership of the appliances. Homie is developing a similar service.

Selling appliance as a service is a major business model switch for manufacturers, distributors and users, and this model can be enhanced further with the support of new technologies. With the Internet of Things, washing machine manufacturers will have access to operational data (temperature, water pressure, vibration…) of millions of equipment. By analysis these data using machine learning technologies, they will determine under which conditions a part is going to break before it actually happens. They will be able to take preventive actions by ordering the right replacement part and scheduling the visit of a field service technician. By owning and managing their own products, vendors would significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of their equipment. This reduction would benefit both their company and their customers. Selling appliance as a service would also drastically improve customers experience, avoiding hurdles of installing, maintaining and disposing appliances, especially for larger ones such as fridges or washing machines.

Design for repair, reuse of refurbishing

However, today, manufacturers have little economic nor legal incentives to manufacture products designed for repair, reuse or refurbishing. Why would they spend additional money designing modular components, manufacturing repairable products or buying durable parts if they cannot capture back part of this value? But incentives will change when vendors will choose to refurbish their own devices or sell their appliances as a service. And it is already happening today. For customers looking for long lasting products, Miele build many updatable appliances, making it possible to re-program electronic units or to upgrade products to include the latest technological advances. When Apple started its iPhone subscription program, it is said to have designed stronger and more resilient iPhones by including a harder aluminium case, a strongest cover glass, as well as additional gaskets and seals that improve water resistance.

Some modular appliances reach the market, such as the Fairphone or the A5 LED phone from Alcatel. Andy Rubin, who created the Android software, also recently launched the Essentials, a new “future-proof” phone with modular components. Most modular phones are built around a main computer board where components, such as a battery or a camera lens, can be easily added like Lego pieces. By allowing users to replace components, modular phones are much easier to repair and upgrade. Unfortunately, these phones have not yet met the expected success. Google stopped its Ara project and LG ended the sale of its modular G5 phone. Customers seem to favour an integrated, all-in-one phone to one with a bunch of components that might require more effort to manage. But modular phones present many opportunities that still remain to be experimented. Phone components could be used into other devices or convert a phone into a new device. For instance, the Moto Z modular phone from Lenovo can be converted into an Amazon’s Alexa home assistant just by adding an additional module.

Frictionless collection

Online retailers allow customers to order appliances in a few minutes and receive them within hours. But it is a different story when it comes to end-of-life collection: having a used device collected is not as easy as buying new one. To remedy this, some vendors and distributors are working on frictionless collection schemes. The Italian online retailer ePRICE.it is considering using a network of 280 lockers to not only deliver new appliances but also collect used ones. US retailers have installed ecoATM kiosks that automatically exchange small used devices, such as smartphones or tablets, against cash. The start-up Volpy has designed an app that, once installed on a smartphone, assesses its technical conditions, estimates and proposes a buyback price and send a courier to collect the device within one hour. In the Netherlands, used electronic equipments are collected by postal service PostNL when delivering mails and packages.² Design consultancy IDEO has come up with a proposal service, Use Me/Lose Me, that would monitor appliances via web-connected chips and if anything went unused for too long, upload, with the owner approval, the product’s details on to an auction site and manage the sale, payment and shipping process.

Electronic and electric equipment manufacturers are amongst the world’s most innovative companies. They are working very hard to make our everyday life easier. But so far they’ve taken little advantage of their unique innovative capacity to adopt circular design approaches, to invent resource efficient production and consumption models or to reduce the use of high value materials. And that needs to change.