If (or when) Bitcoin is no longer a thing, ASICs [Application-specific integrated circuits] cannot be put to work to find cures for cancer or calculate future weather conditions on Mars. ASICs can only mine Bitcoin. When they’re burned out, usually after 18 months or so, they’re scrapped. For every 100 ASIC units coming off the factory conveyor belt today, only three will go on to guess the number correctly. Retired ASICs create around 37,000 tonnes of burned-out electronic waste every year; more than the Netherlands produces. For every one transaction entered on the Bitcoin blockchain today, the equivalent of two iPhones worth of e-waste was produced. And most of this burned-out kit is being shipped illegally to its final resting place in South Asia or Africa. The waste machines are often contaminated with so-called forever chemicals such as polyfluoroalkyl substances. Their use as a non-conductive coolant fluid is popular among Bitcoin miners. When improperly disposed of though, cancer rates and thyroid disease rocket. The chemicals’ persistence also causes environmental problems – forever.
Peter Howson, Let Them Eat Crypto: The Blockchain Scam That's Ruining the World
Malaysia has announced a full ban on e-waste imports, strengthening enforcement as it vows to stop being a dumping ground for global electro
From the article:
In a bold move to protect public health and the environment, Malaysia enacted an immediate and total ban on the import of electronic waste, or e-waste, as the government steps up efforts to stop illegal dumping and corruption tied to waste management.
The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) announced last week that all e-waste would now fall under the “absolute prohibition” category, effectively eliminating prior loopholes that allowed limited importation. Previously, the Department of Environment could grant exemptions for certain categories of e-waste. This discretion has now been revoked.
“E-waste is no longer permitted,” said MACC chief Azam Baki in a statement, pledging “firm and integrated enforcement action” to prevent illegal imports. The move comes amid an ongoing corruption probe involving top officials in the environmental agency.
🍲🚮♻️ “Garbage cafes” across India are tackling plastic waste and hunger! In these cafes springing up around the country thanks to a larger sanitation initiative, people can collect and donate plastic litter in exchange for a hot meal. For many, the cafes mean the difference between food and an empty stomach, and they have already had an impact on the amount of plastic waste going to landfill – in one city, landfill-bound plastic waste fell from 5.4 tons per year in 2019 to just two tons per year in 2024!
Garbage cafes are springing up across India. The BBC visits the city of Ambikapur to find out how much impact they can really have on plasti
This recyclable router could revolutionize e-waste. We're still working on simplifying Wi-Fi passwords though.
"As the world grows “smarter” through the adoption of smartphones, smart fridges, and entire smart houses, the carbon cost of that technology grows, too.
In the last decade, electronic waste has become one of the fastest-growing waste streams in the world.
According to The World Counts, the globe generates about 50 million tons of e-waste every year. That’s the equivalent of 1,000 laptops being trashed every second.
After they’re shipped off to landfills and incinerated, the trash releases toxic chemicals including lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and so much more, which can cause disastrous health effects on the populations that live near those trash sites.
Fortunately, Franziska Kerber — a university student at FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria — has dreamed up a solution that helps carve away at that behemoth problem: electronics made out of recyclable, dissolvable paper.
On September 11, Kerber’s invention “Pape” — or Paper Electronics — earned global recognition when it was named a national winner of the 2024 James Dyson Awards.
When she entered the scientific competition, Kerber demonstrated her invention with the creation of several small electronics made out of paper materials, including a fully-functional WiFi router and smoke detector.
“Small electronic devices are especially prone to ending up in household waste due to unclear disposal systems and their small size, so there is significant potential to develop a more user-friendly end-of-life system,” Kerber wrote on the James Dyson Award website.
“With this in mind, I aimed to move beyond a simple recycling solution to a circular one, ensuring long-term sustainability.”
Kerber’s invention hinges on crafting a dissolvable and recyclable PCB board out of compressed “paper pulp.”
A printed circuit board (PCB) is a board that can be found in nearly all modern electronic devices, like phones, tablets, and smartwatches.
But even companies that have started incorporating a “dissolution” step into the end life of their products require deconstruction to break down and recover the PCB board before it can be recycled.
With Kerber’s PAPE products, users don’t need to take the device apart to recycle it.
“By implementing a user-friendly return option, manufacturers can efficiently dissolve all returned items, potentially reusing electronic components,” Kerber explained.
“Rapidly advancing technology, which forms the core of many devices, becomes obsolete much faster than the structural elements, which are often made from plastics that can last thousands of years,” Kerber poses.
PAPE, Kerber says, has a “designed end-of-life system” which anticipates obsolescence.
“Does anyone want to use a thousand-year-old computer?” Kerber asks. “Of course not. … This ensures a sustainable and reliable system without hindering technological advancement.”"
I don't like how prominent Windows and MacOS are because they make people need to get new hardware all the time.
my daily driver laptop is literally almost 15 years old. it has a first generation, dual core Intel i3 at 2.4GHz with 4GB of RAM, integrated graphics and a 128GB SSD. and it's perfectly usable for daily activities. I can browse the web, watch YouTube, I can even play some games.
and then I look at people saying that they're surprised that companies still sell laptops with 4GB of RAM. 4GB is perfectly usable! with like 10 tabs open in Firefox I'm using only 3GB.
I got this laptop for free because somebody was going to throw it away like 8 years ago or something, because it was getting slow. it ran windows 10 and was definitely slowing down, but by changing some settings on windows it ran a lot better but still not great.
but by putting Linux on it, it suddenly became perfectly powerful enough. even a heavy distro like Ubuntu ran like a breeze on it. I could play games on it again, I could run a bunch of programs at the same time again, I could watch YouTube at 1080p again.
and to this day it's still perfectly usable with modern software. I switched to Debian, and used a more lightweight DE, and it still runs great. it does have hiccups every now and then, namely Firefox no longer uses hardware video decoding on the GPU which makes it a little jittery with 1080p60 YouTube, but other than that, it's perfectly fine.
and installing and using Linux isn't nearly as advanced as people say it is. with just a little bit of knowledge you can easily install and use Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and others, and bring life to computers again.
it's windows that's making your computer slow. stop buying new computers and contributing to e-waste.
and if you don't want to switch, I'm more than happy to take your computer off your hands when it inevitably becomes too slow to use.
