Episode 7 Transcript: Don’t Drown Your Old Gear

Molly Wood: 

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy … where we dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions.

So far on the show … we’ve talked a lot about solutions related to *how … and what … we consume … but the real key to sustainable living is consuming less … and holding on to the things you have.

Especially … gadgets … appliances … phones … tablets … laptops … vacuum cleaners … coffee makers … things otherwise known as … electronic waste.

Electronic waste, or e-waste is the world's fastest-growing waste stream. We produce an estimated 50 *million metric tons.

Aside from the carbon emissions involved in producing billions of these devices every year … only about 20 percent of e-waste is recycled … and when it gets dumped … it leaks toxic materials like lead … mercury … and cadmium.

And if e-waste is incinerated … it releases harmful chemicals into the air … and contributes to air pollution … which *also contributes to warming. It’s a mess …

Now. Yeah. When you hang on to stuff for a long time … that stuff can break … and one of the reasons we’re so trained to get a new phone or laptop or tablet or headphones every couple of years … is we’ve literally been trained … by companies … who do not want us … to fix our stuff. And that leads me to this week’s interview …

Kyle Wiens:

I'm Kyle Wiens, I'm the CEO of iFixit.

iFixit … dot com … is a site that offers manuals and instructions for how to fix your stuff … everything from cell phones to laptops to medical devices to Vespas to purses and shoes. There’s an article on iFixit about how to restore your synthetic wig to its original lustrous hair quality. Like … you can fix a LOT of stuff, turns out.

What Kyle is kind of modest about is how he’s the undisputed leader of a movement called Right to Repair …

Because … first of all … companies go to incredible lengths to make it hard to repair your stuff … but also … back in 1998 … the movie industry pushed a change to federal copyright law … called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act … that was supposed to make it harder to pirate DVDs.

It made it illegal to break the encryption on manufactured products … and to distribute any TOOLS … to break encryption.

All of a sudden … it was effectively illegal to open up your laptop and other devices … this became a huge deal with tractors in particular … John Deere has spent the last 7 years fighting farmers and independent repair shops … saying they weren’t allowed to touch the software inside the tractors unless they used authorized dealers and parts.

And it’s pretty much been a fight ever since … and for the most part … everyday consumers have kind of given up on even trying to fix things like phones and computers … especially … if those laptops or phones … come from Apple … which is … I’m sorry to say … the worst offender when it comes to refusing to let people fix their sht.

In fact … that’s how Kyle … got his start as a fixit pied piper.

Kyle Wiens:

I was a college student trying to fix my laptop and Apple threw up obstacles that made it difficult and that that made it. So I was like, well, let me, let me find a way to make it easier for the next person if I had to suffer so much.

Kyle Wiens:

So I started writing repair guides that Apple wouldn't share. We put them online. We've been doing it ever since, and so I fix its mission, is to teach everybody how to fix all of their stuff. Whether it's a laptop or a cell phone or a lawnmower or a chainsaw or a refrigerator, we wanna help you fix your stuff. 

And I'm very pragmatic. I'm an engineer and I'm just looking at the problems. I'm saying, okay, if you wanna be able to fix something, you need the information on how to fix it. You need the tools. You need the fancy iPhone screwdriver if there's a special screwdriver and you need the parts. And so we started building that ecosystem in an open source fashion on iFixit where we'd write the information, we'd track down the tools, maybe we'd make custom tools if we needed to. 

We'd go to China, we'd get the parts, and we'd be doing that over and over systematically for every gadget we could get our hands on for about 20 years now. The problem is we can't always do that. We can't always solve it either. There's something that gets in the way, like maybe the main board on the, on an iPhone is a part that we can't make because it has secret sauce on it.

Kyle Wiens:There's no way for us to make an aftermarket A11 chip, and so we need to be able to go to Apple and buy those, and they weren't selling. Or the information, you know, we've been crowdsourcing and we've been writing repair manuals. We've hundreds of thousands of people around the world writing repair manuals for products, and we can't keep up with how fast manufacturers make new things.

Kyle Wiens:

So every year at CES, there's like 15,000 new gadgets that come out. We can't write 15,000 complete repair manuals every year. We can write many thousands, but not enough. So the manufacturers need to be part of the solution. And that's where about 10 years ago we realized, okay, we've taken this to the limits.

Kyle Wiens:

The community is contributing a lot. We're contributing a lot. We can't keep up with the manufacturers. They need to be part of the solution. And so I very naively went and asked nicely, like, Hey guys, you wanna help? And I just got a wall of silence across the board. So we started working on legal solutions to encourage them or require them to help.

Molly Wood:

Let's just make it super explicit why they don't wanna help, which is that if you repair your item, you will keep it longer and thereby you will not buy a new one.

Kyle Wiens:

How many things do we need in the world? Globally, all of civilization, we manufacture about 1.5 billion smartphones a year. What's the right amount? The amount is more than zero, it's probably less than 1.5 billion. We probably don't need to be making that many. And every single phone that we make is a couple hundred pounds of CO2 in the air.

Kyle Wiens:

It's several hundred pounds of raw material dug out of the ground to grind out rock and get the gold and the lithium and all the materials that we need that we're not good at recovering. So, we literally dig a mountain outta the earth every day to make the smartphones. I would like to dig a smaller mountain every year.

Molly Wood:

So I wonder at what point, you know, I am of the opinion that every story is sort of fundamentally a climate story. In your case, it sounds like you came to this as it's just a practicality story. The longer I can keep this, the less money it costs. At what point would you say you started to become aware of what a big climate story this really is and what a big deal it is?

Kyle Wiens:

Yeah, I mean, I came at it from a e-waste angle, from a looking at, you know, end of life, where do these things go? What are the harms caused, um, in mining and then manufacturing. And then, but then we did the math and we realized electronics are the most carbon intensive products that we make. 

Uh, and it's just pure energy that goes into making these. If you take the phone and say, well, where does the energy go? Most of it goes into the chips. It's the individual processes. Like, well, where's the energy go in making chips? It is literally x-ray machines, ablating atoms off the top of these silicon wafers. Every time they build a new chip or they wanna upgrade the equipment in one of these silicon fabs, they have to bring in massive new pipes with just huge wires.

Kyle Wiens:

Like the actual size of the copper wire into these fabs is a large part of the limitations of like where and how they build these fabs. And of course where the fabs are, generally it's coal fired power. So when I say it's, you know, it could be I think Apple's number, something like 500 pounds of CO2 per iPhone.

Kyle Wiens:

That CO2 is CO2 in China, Taiwan, that is the carbon emitted when we're burning coal to make the chips that go in our devices. And those chips don't have a built-in death clock. There's no reason those chips should only last for a year or two. You make a chip, it could last for 10, 20, 30 years.

Kyle Wiens:And so we look at it from like, okay, we need technology. We're gonna manufacture these things. When we do, let's just make sure that technology lasts as long as possible. So we need to make fewer upfront.

Molly Wood:

Well, it seems like there's a little bit of a double question here. One is components around the chip are primarily what fail, right? Like just to break this down, you're saying the chip can probably last orders of magnitude longer than the actual device. What is it that fails, just so we can understand how absurd it is that we would get rid of a device if the chip is still good?

Kyle Wiens:

Right. Yeah. So let's keep talking about smartphones, but this applies to everything. So with smartphones, it's the glass. You drop it, you break the glass, um, uh, or it's the battery and you think about the glass. You know, how many of us have gotten a ding or crack in our windshield? Probably all of us.

Molly Wood:

I got one recently. I'm so furious, man.

Kyle Wiens:

I'm so sorry. You didn't even do anything wrong. Are you considering throwing away your car?

Molly Wood:

Definitely not.

Kyle Wiens:

But like, when you drop your phone, you crack the screen. That's something everyone like, do I want to fix it? Or maybe it's time to get a new one. Like that's on a conversation all of us have with ourselves about our phone. That has never happened. I've never met a person who was like, oh yeah, I cracked my windshield time for a new car.

Kyle Wiens:

It's just ludicrous. Same thing with a battery on a car. Your battery goes out, you go to AutoZone, you get a new one. And it's the same thing. So you have these consumables they just wear out or, or items that break easily. We shouldn't throw away the whole thing for the sake of, you know, the shortest lived component.

Kyle Wiens:

And we certainly don't do that with cars. You don't do that with many things in our life. But for some reason, electronics are these magical, black rectangles that are perfect and created by, you know, the holy Johnny Ive on the hill and we can't, we couldn't possibly understand enough to be able to swap the battery in our phone, even though we can, and our car is the same way.

Molly Wood:

Okay. Let's talk about Apple specifically, which you've brought up several times because I think it's possible people may not realize, especially because I would say Apple has, in recent years in particular, presented itself as pretty environmentally forward thinking. Um, and yet is the company that effectively created the throwaway culture that you’re fighting against.

Kyle Wiens:

Yeah. The iPod was the first one until the iPod. Anything that came with a battery, it was swappable. It was no big deal. And the iPod was the first one where it came out and it was, you know, 4,000 songs in your pocket. Cool. Oh, by the way, it only lasts two years and then it stops working. And I, I don't know anyone who has an iPod that they bought back in the day that still works.

Kyle Wiens:

They all stopped. Why do the iPods stop working? They should still play music, right? We like music now, just like we did back then. Why aren't we still using our iPods? I mean, yes, phones do it too, but that's not the only reason. It's that the iPods literally stopped working because the batteries were out.

Kyle Wiens:

We could have kept them running. We still do sell iPod batteries on iFixit. But it, few and far between, right? And so it's that conflation, it's gluing in a consumable into something that should last much, much longer. That's the problem. That's the real, you know, environmental and climate issue.

Molly Wood:

And then let's talk about e-waste itself, which is the fastest growing waste stream on the planet.

Kyle Wiens:

I mean, I at least have this opinion, this idea that if I go and I take my phone in and I turn it, I trade it in that it may be recycled or repaired. Yeah. If you trade your phone in, they're worth enough value. Someone's going to reuse it.

Molly Wood:

Okay.

Kyle Wiens:

That is a good development. The real problem is the phone's sitting in our drawers, our closets. Right. Because they're losing value or they're not getting used.

Kyle Wiens:

If you're going to upgrade the phone, the most environmentally friendly thing you can do with the phone that you have is to sell it and get as much money as you possibly can do the most selfish possible thing. Because trading it in is fine, right? Just get someone to give you some amount of money for it because that, that person or entity or trade-in partner is gonna be incentivized with that $50 that, that they paid you to get at least $50 of utility out of it. 

If you're going to grind this up and shred it, the raw commodity value of the gold and the silver and the mercury and the lithium in this phone is worth about 25 cents. So anyone paying you more than 25 cents for your phone is going to be reusing it.

Molly Wood:

Got it. And the most, uh, you know, it's funny cause I say this about cars all the time. The most environmentally friendly car is in fact one you already have, which applies to a lot of things, right? How much of this is just breaking the cult of new?

Kyle Wiens:

Yeah, no. We talk about save the planet through sheer laziness. Just hang onto the things you've already got. You don't need to go buy anything new. You don't need to worry about transferring your apps to a new phone. Just hang onto the thing you've already got and we need to, we need to calm down, slow down our pace, hang onto the things we have a bit longer, and everything will be fine.

Ok, we have to take a quick break … and by the way … if you’d like to subscribe to Everybody in the Pool … and get an ad-free version of the show … check the link in the description of this episode … in your podcast app of choice … it’s only 5 bucks a month!

When we come back … we’ll talk about the activism side of things … and how … in addition to you hanging onto your stuff longer … the Right to Repair movement is starting to score some legislative victories, too.

[ad break]

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. I’m talking with Kyle Wiens … the CEO of iFixit … and the leader of the movement to … I can’t even believe I have to say this … make it legal for you to fix the stuff you own.

Molly Wood:

All right. Let's talk about the right to repair movement legislatively because as you went to these manufacturers and you said, Hey, help me out here. They said, no thank you. At some point we literally had to turn to legislation.

Kyle Wiens:

That's really, that's where we ended up.

Kyle Wiens:

Yeah, so we ended up just having to ask state lawmakers. And so I spent the last 10, 12 years working on legislation, right to repair legislation where it says, Hey, if you have a repair network, you need to make available to consumers the same exact information, tools, parts, that you make available to your authorized repair shops. And the electronics manufacturers have fought that tooth and nail, and they have spent many, many, many millions of dollars trying to prevent you from having the right to repair.

Kyle Wiens:

As we're talking now, in fact, I think Minnesota just became the fourth state to pass a right to repair law.

Kyle Wiens:

We've been passing all kinds of bills and as a matter of fact, today I just heard, Pennsylvania introduced the 30th, right to repair bill this year. So we're at three outta five states in the US, have 60% of the population.

Kyle Wiens:

Um, and then, yeah, Minnesota passed right to repair for, broad sweeping for electronics, for appliances, for enterprise equipment. Fantastic bill. And that will go into effect 1st.

Molly Wood:

Yeah, we should be clear that this is, we are talking about electronics, but I mean really, and it's important from a climate perspective too, to make it clear that we're also talking about, I think years ago you and I talked about my coffee machine. Breville is the worst on this. But it's about everything.

Kyle Wiens:

It's about everything. It's about your refrigerator.

Kyle Wiens:

It used to be that when your refrigerator broke, you wanted to upgrade it so you'd get a more energy efficient refrigerator that was better for the planet. Now that's not the case. We're not seeing, refrigerators become significantly more efficient. And so if you have a refrigerator, you wanna keep it.

Molly Wood:

And as we move up that I don't know, size and complexity chain to appliances and you know, it's, there's the, yes, I wanna sell my phone. That's an environmentally friendly action. What about my refrigerator? What about my other appliance?

Kyle Wiens:

Pretty accessible, but I would say just hang on to it. So try not to upgrade your appliances if you can avoid it. They're just fine. But if you do need to or if you're moving or you know, then, then yeah, absolutely sell them. We were just hanging out yesterday with a guy, well, I'll, I'll give him props.

Kyle Wiens:

All star appliances here in central California, great organization. He gets returns, refurbs, he'll buy appliances off of Craigslist and he refurbs them and then sells 'em. And he does a fantastic job. And he's just blown away at the things that people throw away. He's like, this took me five minutes to fix.

Molly Wood:

Is that becoming more common, the kind of circular economy for appliances?

Kyle Wiens:

I think it's always been there. I don't know if it's getting more or less common than it's been, but I would say it's something that's available that you can seek out. And I think we should, in society, we should prefer it, right? Like the shiny new, fancy screen on your washing machine is not fundamentally a good thing.

Kyle Wiens:

It's more that we'll break, it's, they're not better at cleaning your clothes than the older one. So we need to get away from our fetish with the absolute newest, like, is wifi in your washing machine really making your life better?

Molly Wood:

I liked the old one. There was a button. You pushed the button, it did the thing. You walked away. Yeah, it was great.

Kyle Wiens:

LGS website says that you should check for security updates for your refrigerator every other month. So just put that on your household chore to-do list.

Molly Wood:

That silence I hear, is my mouth hanging open. I have no idea. Well, you know, interestingly, I did see that NHTSA, the National Highway Safety and Transportation Administration is today as we're taping this. Tell car makers to ignore a Massachusetts right to repair law because they're saying that it could make cars unsafe.

Kyle Wiens:

Yeah, this is absolutely ridiculous and I am so frustrated. So, just to back up and share the context, a couple years ago, Massachusetts passed an auto right to repair law that said, Hey, the wireless. Telematics. This is wireless signals that your car is sending. So BMW is sending, your car is telling BMW, Hey, I could, I'd like an oil change.

Kyle Wiens:

And then BMW is like, Hey, we scheduled an oil change at the dealer for you Tuesday at nine o'clock. If you want to turn that off, or if you want to have that set up to go to your local mechanic rather than the BMW dealership. There was no way to do that. So the Massachusetts law says you have to make that software available so that consumers can choose where they send their wireless data.

Kyle Wiens:

Seems reasonable. The car makers have spent the last couple years suing to stop it. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration had the last couple years to weigh in and could have done anything. They waited until, the last minute. The Attorney General said they were gonna start enforcing the law June 1st a couple weeks ago, and then today.

Kyle Wiens:

This government agency sends a letter saying, no, it's not safe to enforce this law that's been on the books for years. This is ludicrous. It's bureaucratic overreach. The Biden administration should be ashamed of themselves. I think they probably are. I think there were wires crossed internally.

Kyle Wiens:

Because this is absolutely the wrong policy, not just for the planet, but for security and safety. This is the wrong safety perspective. Like your car. Talking wirelessly to the manufacturer does not enhance the safety. It makes you less safe.

Molly Wood:

Does this feel like a sort of coordinated attack?

Kyle Wiens:

It could be, I don't know.

Molly Wood:

I mean, do you think this is like a, we need to check in here?

Kyle Wiens:

Do you remember a few, a few years back, Wired had a thing where, where a hacker took control of a Jeep on the highway and the Jeep is going down the road, and he was able to take control and stop it on the highway. So the hacker, white hat hacker, Charlie Miller, I talked with him afterwards and I said, Charlie, what was the hard part about hacking that Jeep?

Kyle Wiens:

And he said, what was on the Sprint network? The hard part was actually hacking that particular Jeep on the Sprint network, and not just every Jeep on the Sprint network at the same time. It was much easier to do that.

Molly Wood:

So plenty. What you're saying is there's plenty that is already unsafe that's going on?

Kyle Wiens:

This one thing, you know what's, what could you do to make your car safer? Yank the SIM card out of it. That would be a good idea.

Molly Wood:

Um, what, okay, I wanna go back to climate for a real, a quick second before I let you go. Is there a category, I mean, we've talked a lot about consumer electronics because I think to your point, those are the most sort of, obviously disposable to people, or at least that's the category that people put them in. Is there a category that you would say, look, you should go to freaking jail if you throw this thing away?

Kyle Wiens:

Well, AirPods are kind of in that, in that category, but I don't know what else to do with them. I would say the problem is batteries, both batteries limit the lifespan. But batteries also cause, cause fires and recycling. So we actually, in my area, we had a major fire in our recycling center last week.

Kyle Wiens:

They don't know what caused it. It was probably a battery. And if you look in your local news, look for, literally a garbage truck fire where garbage trucks catch on fire. Cause what happens if you, if you throw an iPad into the trash and then the trash truck picks it up and it's got a compactor in it, it compacts it.

Kyle Wiens:

And that battery gets crushed. Then you get a spark off the battery, it smolders, and then it catches paper and cardboard and the trash on fire. And then the whole, the whole trash truck goes up. This happens on a very regular basis. The EPA put out a big report last year detailing all the fires we're having in recycling facilities across the country.

Kyle Wiens:

So you should not ever put something with a battery in the trash or the recycling. Unfortunately, you know, go to Best Buy. Probably everything you can buy is gonna have a battery in it. So you have a whole store full of stuff that you can't put in the trash or the recycling.

Kyle Wiens:

We need to come to grips with that as a society.

Molly Wood:

And then when I do take those things to Best Buy, I am on the board of SF Goodwill,

Molly Wood:

the regional Goodwill. And I have seen firsthand the refusal to send anything to landfill. I mean, their e-waste operation is phenomenal, at least in this region. But how do we know? I mean, eventually everything needs to go somewhere, right?

Kyle Wiens:

Yeah. At some point everything needs to go to the recycling, and I would just say, maximize all possible utility for a thing. Even if it can't be used as a cell phone anymore, maybe you can use it as a music player, or I use our old phone as a baby camera monitor, right? There's all kinds of things you can do, so get all possible utility out of it.

Kyle Wiens:

Donate to schools, donate to Goodwill. But then, yeah, and end of life, everything needs to be recycled. Goodwill and others will get it to an e-waste processor that will, extract the raw materials.

Molly Wood:

Amazing. I love it. Just keep your stuff. I just keep saying this over and over. It's the easiest solution ever. I love the idea.

Kyle Wiens:

Yeah, save the planet through sheer laziness. Just hang on to last year's model. It'll be fine.

Molly Wood:

Kyle, thanks so much for all you do. You're a massively impactful person in the climate fight.

Kyle Wiens:

Thank you. We're having lots of fun. And finally, we are making progress and we're winning. We're actually getting laws passed. I spent so many years failing to get laws passed. Now finally, we're starting to win. It feels good. Thanks, Molly.

Molly Wood:

It's great to talk to you. Take care.

That site one more time … ifixit dot com … and please … by all means … in addition to being cool by carrying old stuff around … feel absolutely free to pressure your state lawmakers *AND … your federal representatives … to pass a national right to repair law … because this … is frankly just stupid.

And as a kicker, let me tell you a little story. I recently stopped by the Apple store with my brother … he has AirPod Max headphones … and he wanted to buy replacement ear cushions … you know the part that just pops out that you can replace when it gets worn or torn because why would you EVER throw out perfectly good headphones because the like … pillow part is torn?

The Apple store … wouldn’t sell them to him. They told him that he had to make a Genius Bar appointment to buy replacement parts, because they considered it a "repair." So technically you have the right to repair … but they make it as difficult as humanly possible.

They sell the ear cushions on Amazon, by the way.

COME ON, APPLE. ENOUGH ALREADY.

All right …. that's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool.

Please like, subscribe, and leave a rating on Apple Podcasts if that's what you're using. Email your thoughts and ideas to IN at everybody in the pool dot com.

And for an even deeper dive, sign up for my newsletter at mollywood dot co.

Together, we can get this done. 

See you next week.