JOURNEY TO SUSTAINABILITY

Better Decisions Start With Different Thinking

The “big Audacious goal” that we should all be working toward is a world with a circular economy…a world without waste, where everything we use becomes a part of the next thing.

And so, all the different members of the electronics industry should be challenged to ask, “What’s our role in contributing to a circular economy? How do we do our part?”

For SERI, we’re thinking beyond circularity with electronics, because being circular doesn’t necessarily mean we are being sustainable.

What does sustainability look like in our world and how will we know when we get there? By definition, if we are fully sustainable with our electronics, we are enjoying all of the benefits that they bring us today, without compromising the health of our planet and our people for future generations. But SERI wants to take this even further. Beyond “doing no harm,” SERI believes that the world’s used electronics can actually enrich the lives of everyone around the globe by bridging the digital divide.

it starts with Thinking differently

SERI sees the “electronics lifecycle” as the key to sustainability. What’s the electronics lifecycle? It is the total of everything that happens to our electronics from how we make them to what we do with them when we are done – and everything in between. And it is the decisions that we make all along this electronics lifecycle that determine how sustainable we are, and how much we contribute to a circular economy. Because every one of these decisions has the opportunity to create positive or negative outcomes, for everyone all around the world.

And, solving this challenge is going to take everyone, thinking differently and working collaboratively. We are all in this together.

Looking back to move forward

Historically, humans have taken from the Earth thinking more about our immediate needs than how plentiful or scarce the natural resources are, the impact on the planet, or what we were going to do with our waste afterwords. For our electronics, we mined from our Earth for raw materials, made our devices, used them until we were done, and then threw them out with the garbage. And that cycle was repeated, every time we created something new.

take make

In this model, we have nothing but negative outcomes through the entirety of the lifecycle. Constantly taking from the earth is incredibly damaging because it does not renew itself. It’s a finite resource that will run out. Compounding the resource scarcity is the environmental impact on climate change that mining alone causes.

And when we were done with our devices, we simply tossed our used electronics into landfills, comingled with all the rest of our waste. When we realized that e-waste was hazardous and that we couldn’t landfill it the same way we treat other waste and that processing it differently added expense, we took the easy way out and started exporting it to other parts of the world so we wouldn’t have to deal with it ourselves. That was our e-waste management plan and there was nothing sustainable about this model.

In 1989, the Basel Convention was convened as a necessary intervention to the harm we were doing by exporting hazardous waste, setting controls for the transboundary movement of waste. As impactful as the Basel Convention continues to be, it is still a reactionary way to deal with e-waste, meaning it deals with the waste we keep creating rather than the sources of waste production.

Recycling comes to electronics

Eventually, we began to recognize that there is real value in much of what we were calling e-waste, and as a way to both reduce waste and recover materials with value, the concept of electronics recycling gained momentum.

With recycling, we were finally starting to truly manage our e-waste in a responsible manner – reducing some of the harm to our environment. And adding recycling as an option at the end of the electronics lifecycle bent the model from linear to circular, where at least some portion of the waste output became the starting materials for new devices.

While this circular model is considerably better than the old linear model, by itself recycling still doesn’t make the lifecycle sustainable. Though we’ve gotten far better, we still have a long way to go before responsible recycling is widely available and financially viable. And not only does recycling have to be undertaken responsibly, and sometimes with a cost, even if the entire world adopted responsible recycling practices for our devices today, we’d still have some amount of waste that is left over because our devices aren’t made up of 100% recyclable materials.

make take arrows

To get to zero e-waste, we have to stop being reactionary and become proactive. We have to reject the idea that e-waste is a necessary outcome of having our electronics. And we have to stop focusing only on the end of life portion of the electronics lifecycle. We can design out waste through materials choices, thinking about ease of repair and upgrading, and considering recycling at the very beginning of the lifecycle.

Beyond doing no harm

But here’s the thing…even if we get to zero e-waste, at best we’ll be at net neutral with our electronics, no longer doing damage.

At SERI, we want to go beyond net neutral. We need to make sure we are using all the utility that is in our devices. Every last drop, to go beyond “doing no harm” and instead use them to do good. We buy electronics because they enrich our lives. We know we can make a positive social impact with our used electronics by using them to close the digital divide and create economic inclusion where new devices are just not affordable.

Becoming sustainable with our electronics isn’t just about managing our e-waste until we can reach zero, or deciding between recycling and reuse. And it isn’t just about making sure we are responsible every step of the way.

It’s about doing all of these things together, at the same time. Every one of us, all around the world.

That’s how we’ll eventually reach sustainability with our electronics and do our part in helping to build a real circular economy.