How repairable is your tech, and why should you care?
The US produces 6.9 million tons of e-waste every year, but this a global problem, where 48 million tons of electronics are discarded, with 80% going to landfill (information courtesy of iFixit). Since the start of the Covid pandemic, tech sales have been on a roll, with double-digit year-on-year percentage increases in PC sales in both 2020 and 2021, alongside sold-out webcams, headsets, monitors, and other equipment as people have struggled to equip for remote work.
Changes to work forced upon us by the pandemic may permanently increase our tech footprint as many workers have much of their desk set-up replicated in more than one location. This puts even more pressure on us when it comes to the end-of-life of this equipment, both in terms of reducing the environmental impact, but also financial sustainability for businesses that may be having to invest much more. For smaller organizations, balancing these new demands for flexibility with stretched IT budgets can be even more of a challenge.
A report released recently grades laptop and cell phone manufacturers on the repairability of their equipment. No company achieves an A rating in either category, but Dell, Asus, Lenovo, and Acer fare much better than Microsoft and Apple, achieving B grades and D grades respectively. As more workers rely on laptops than desktop PCs, factors such as these may be important to extending the life of equipment.
It used to be that for the average workload the demands of applications and websites quickly made new tech feel sluggish, and alongside this the longevity of equipment was questionable. This built a culture of ongoing replacement every few years to be able to get the best out of new software and to avoid an emergency replacement after something had gone wrong.
Those days though are long behind us. While it is true that Windows 11 has added new hardware requirements that make it unusable on even fairly recent hardware, Windows 10 is supported by Microsoft until 2025 and will run minimally on pretty much any PC that met the requirements for Windows 7 that was released in 2009. The latest version of MacOS, similarly, supports hardware dating back as far as 2013. Alongside this, business-class computers from the likes of HP and Dell can run perfectly well for years beyond the 3-5 year replacement cycles that many businesses - with hardware vendors and IT service companies - advocate. How appropriate an older system is will depend on use case, and, to some extent, how much downtime can be balanced against the cost of replacement.
Repairability is an important factor in extending the life of technology, and, ultimately, extending its life is the most practical way to deal with the issue of technology related waste currently. It is unlikely we are all suddenly going to start using less equipment and while manufacturers are finding more sustainable ways to build equipment, these efforts are in their infancy. That said, a lot of equipment that is disposed of by original users is not in need of repair, it has simply become end-of-life due to an arbitrary replacement cycle based upon a decades-old and outdated understanding of how long hardware is useful.
So, as a small organization IT leader, there are lots of factors to consider alongside, and maybe ahead of, repairability that will impact the environmental and financial impact of your IT procurement decisions. These include:
IT procurement alignment with financial, environmental sustainability, and HR objectives.
Development of hardware upgrade cycles that aren't one-size fits all.
Reducing waste by buying higher-end hardware that will functionally serve your needs for longer.
Having a plan for how to get help outside of warranty support.
Availability of on-hand spares to eliminate most downtime if something does go wrong.
If you decommission functional equipment, can you recycle it through 3rd party organizations?
Ensure user buy-in. There may be certain prestige or status connected to having the latest hardware, make sure everyone understands the wider benefit of changing your approach.
Ultimately, the more we can all do to ensure that all technology is kept in a working state for longer, the less impact e-waste will have for us and future generations.
Title image credit: Photo by Kilian Seiler on Unsplash
