Member-only story
Featured
Windows 10’s e-waste mountain, circular economy Black Mirror-style, sharing beef couscous and the ski season that never was.
This month my wife’s laptop stopped working. On 14 October, Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 10, forcing millions of laptops into premature retirement and generating mountains of avoidable e-waste. Ironically, it did this in the same week as International Repair Day (18 October). This effected an estimated 400 million computers globally, potentially leading to over 700 million kg of e-waste. It was described as a global e-waste disaster. My wife’s perfectly good laptop, which we planned to pass on to our daughter when she started secondary school, now just another drop in the e-waste ocean.
Known as ‘planned obsolescence’, creating hardware that doesn’t last is a key part of Big Tech’s business strategy. We are forced to replace good, working products, to feed the profit machine. I haven’t bought an Apple product ever since watching my well-looked-after iPad 2.0 cease to be of use as all the apps slowly cease to operate, one by one. My expensive piece of tech, rare earth metals and all, became junk. With this business model seemingly passively accepted (most Americans replace their smart phone every 2–3 years and 15% do every 6–12 months!), it’s not…
