In an era defined by rapid technological development, the exponential growth of electronic devices creates convenience and unprecedented challenges. As new technologies and gadgets transform our lifestyles, a silent crisis looms on the horizon: electronic waste, or e-waste, is a significant threat to our environment. Making devices easier to repair so that they last longer can help stop a tidal wave of electronic trash.

E-waste not only packs landfills but also releases toxic substances into soil and water, endangering ecosystems and public health, in no small part as a consequence of corporations not designing their products to last. Consumers and small businesses have called for greater autonomy and the ability to affordably repair defective and worn out products, in what has come to be known as the Right-to-Repair movement.

As expected, corporate push-back to such proposals has slowed progress. These practices contribute to a wasteful throwaway culture. Yet, despite the pocketbook savings and environmental benefits consumers would reap if they could fix their phones and even in-vehicle digital systems easily, many remain unaware of their growing rights to fix broken or worn down devices like smartphones, laptops, or computers.

Right to Repair: Consumers vs. Corporations

When devices break down or stop working properly, it makes more sense to fix or replace the damaged parts rather than buying a new product. However, consumers frequently find that their repair options are restricted to either manufacturer-approved outlets or through the company’s own service organization, often at a steep price. Moreover, relying on the annual introduction of newer and better, ever more expensive models that encourage upgrading instead of preserving devices, companies continue to design their products obsolescence built-in.

Repairs are more costly than buying a new product or upgrading. It isn’t surprising that broken devices are often discarded and become e-waste well before they stop working.

While hard-to-repair electronics might be a nuisance for consumers, it represents a greater problem for small businesses that provide more affordable repair services. Newer, slimmer models use glue or solder delicate chips and components in configurations that make it increasingly difficult to take products apart for repair. Meanwhile, manufacturers don’t provide the necessary schematics, manuals, software diagnostics, and special repair tools required to perform such repairs unless businesses become certified corporate partners.

Dissatisfaction with such questionable practices has grown to the point where politicians and even some companies cannot ignore the outcry from consumers. Over the past decade, a burgeoning movement advocating for individuals’ right to repair began coalescing, gaining significant traction. Proponents argue that consumers should be allowed to fix the items they bought, potentially saving $40 billion a year. They point out that authorized repair shops and professionals should be allowed access at reasonable prices to technical documents, parts, and tools needed to perform these repairs, allowing small businesses to operate.

Meanwhile, limited warranties and built in death-dates can lead to situations such as the Chromebook debacle that left many schools unable to use otherwise serviceable laptops after their software update licenses expired.

A recent global survey of laptop and desktop computers users found that up to 67% of participants weren’t familiar with their potential right to repair the products they own.  Even if people’s awareness of the concept itself is surprisingly limited, Consumer Reports survey found that over 80% of adult Americans would favor right-to-repair legislation when asked.

E-Waste’s Concerning Environmental and Health Impacts 

The United Nations estimates that worldwide e-waste reached a staggering 53.6 million metric tons in 2019, of which 6.93 million tons were attributable to the US alone. Only 17.4% of e-waste is recycled, with the remaining 82.6% either decomposing in landfills or being burned in incinerators.

E-waste is not just voluminous; it is inherently hazardous. Within the sleek casings of the gadgets we use and discard lies a cocktail of toxic substances. These include carcinogenic heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic, which can seep into soil and water sources, contaminating ecosystems and endangering human, animal, and marine health. Brominated flame retardants and synthetic PFAS, known as ‘forever chemicals,’ are used in circuit boards and display screens, persisting in the environment for centuries and accumulating in living organisms, which poses a potential risk to wildlife and humans.

In the US, e-waste related pollution disproportionately affects low-income ethnic communities, which are more likely to live in the vicinity of highly contaminated waste disposal areas and Superfund cleanup sites.

Until recently, a lot of the e-waste produced in the US was shipped overseas, primarily to Asia, leading to protective measures such as China’s 2018 National Sword policy which reduced the country’s recyclable waste imports by 30%. The disposal and mishandling of e-waste in unregulated recycling operations in developing countries and emerging economies further compound the problem. These informal recycling practices release harmful chemicals into the air, leading to respiratory ailments and other health issues among workers and nearby communities.

Our “throwaway culture” also exacts an enormous environmental toll, as manufacturing new electronics from scratch requires the destructive, carbon-intensive mining of vast amounts of  lithium, gold, platinum, and rare earth elements.

Prolonging the life of electronic devices through repair and reuse can help significantly mitigate the carbon footprint associated with their production. Extending the lifespan of electronic devices by 50% to 100% can help reduce half of the total greenhouse gas emissions associated with mineral mining, manufacturing, and supply chain logistics

Promising Signs of Progress

The Right to Repair is a contentious matter involving consumers, tech companies, and government because changes come with extensive economic, social, and environmental implications.

Ultimately, consumers should be able to repair or modify items they’ve legally purchased, and repair businesses should be granted access to the resources they require to service clients affordably and earn a living without undue bureaucratic restrictions.

“The right to repair does not mean that you have to fix all of your own stuff. It means that it should be possible for you to get it fixed somehow, whether you have a friend who is tech savvy or excited about opening things up and wants to do it, or if you want to take it down to a neighborhood repair shop,” said Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit, in an interview with The New York Times.

Tech companies and industry lobby groups have supported their opposing stance to ‘Right to Repair’ by citing supposed issues pertaining to consumer safety risks, independent repair businesses’ inability to perform quality work, data security and privacy concerns, intellectual property, and clients’ design preferences. In May 2021, the Federal Trade Commission released a scathing report picking apart corporate arguments and finding “scant evidence to support manufacturers’ justifications for repair restrictions.”

After the non-profit As You Sow filed a shareholder resolution, Microsoft agreed to increase consumers’ repair options by the end of 2022. The company funded a third-party study that found repairing a product instead of replacing it can lead to a 92% reduction in e-waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

Though tentatively resistant, multiple companies have taken steps to address their device’s repairability over the last year, including Apple and Samsung. Most recently, Lenovo announced that it plans to make 80% of its devices consumer-repairable by 2025.

As awareness of the Right to Repair continued to gain momentum, multiple US states considered legislative proposals. On December 29, 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Digital Fair Repair Act, giving consumers in the state the right to fix their own electronics and protecting them from anti-competitive efforts to limit their options. In spite of interference from trade associations like TechNet, which effectively watered down the Digital Fair Repair Act by the time it was signed, the bill’s adoption is seen as a major victory by Right-to-Repair advocates.

In September 2023, California’s Right to Repair Act, Senate Bill 244, passed the State Assembly in a unanimous vote and became law. Perhaps most surprising of all, Apple expressed its support for the proposal in a letter,  prompting more than a fair share of eyebrows raised in suspicion considering its track record of opposing Right to Repair initiatives.

Whether tech companies’ sudden change of heart toward repairability is an earnest commitment to more sustainable practices or simply a preemptive move to soften the blow of coming reforms, it’s important that consumers are provided adequate options to repair damaged products, not only as a more affordable alternative, but also to help reduce the ever growing tide of e-waste.

Definitely, we will all gain from this change, both by giving a second life to our electronics and producing less e-waste. Meanwhile, you can do something to help pass the Right to Repair bill in your state. The Right to Repair advocacy website helps people send messages to their representatives in support of legislation.

About the Author

Vlad Turiceanu is the Editor-in-Chief at windowsreport.com, a leading independent online publication that covers Microsoft’s Windows platform and its related products and services, connecting millions of people with the correct answers they seek online.

A holistic transformation is needed for the planet to accommodate people’s pursuit of well-being. A new study by an international team of researchers explores a Theory of Planetary Social Pedagogy as a driver of a transformative process based on a learning society.

The Theory of Planetary Social Pedagogy is a way of learning applicable to all societal sectors. According to it, people, societies and the world are an interlinked, systemic entity. Such a worldview can make life meaningful, increase people’s experiences of belonging and inclusion, expand the scope of care, and help people identify their opportunities to influence.

In a time marked by crises, learning to be one with the world is increasingly essential. In many ways, our everyday lives are linked with all other life on Earth. People are constantly connected to their surrounding reality through, for example, the food they eat and the air they breathe.

According to Professor Arto O. Salonen of the University of Eastern Finland, the study’s lead author, the main reason behind the escalating planetary crises is the illusion of people being detached from their surrounding reality.

“As we strive for a comprehensive sustainability transition, we need increasingly robust and more systemic interpretations of reality.”

The current political strategy for a sustainable future emphasises economic and technological progress, but that is not enough. Learning is needed, too. A learning society relies on changes in its citizens’ values, beliefs and worldviews.

“How we become aware of our everyday connection to other people and nature at the level of our emotions, body and mind stands at the core of the sustainability transition,” says Planning Manager Erkka Laininen of the OKKA Foundation for Teaching, Education, and Personal Development, a co-author of the study. Having an experience of belonging to and being part of the world strengthens people’s sense of meaningfulness and their agency needed in building a sustainable future.

The transformative power of a learning society can be a key factor in the green transformation permeating all society, in which citizens’ consumer behaviour and ways of living, moving and producing food and energy are organised in new ways. Conceptions of work and the economy can be reformed, too.

A sustainable future is not about life becoming more miserable — it’s about life becoming richer and more meaningful as hope for the future grows stronger.

William Ripple, a distinguished professor in the Oregon State University College of Forestry, and former OSU postdoctoral researcher Christopher Wolf are the lead authors of the report, and 10 other U.S. and global scientists are co-authors.

“Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from the Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater,” Wolf said.

Published in BioScience, “The 2023 State of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory” notes that 20 of 35 planetary vital signs the authors use to track climate change are at record extremes.

The authors share new data illustrating that many climate-related records were broken by “enormous margins” in 2023, particularly those relating to ocean temperatures and sea ice. They also note an extraordinary Canadian wildfire season that produced unprecedented carbon dioxide emissions.

The report follows by four years the “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency” published by Ripple and collaborators in BioScience and co-signed by more than 15,000 scientists in 161 countries.

“Life on our planet is clearly under siege,” Ripple said. “The statistical trends show deeply alarming patterns of climate-related variables and disasters. We also found little progress to report as far as humanity combating climate change.”

Among the key numbers in the report:

• Fossil fuel subsidies — actions by governments that artificially lower the cost of energy production, raise the price received by producers or lower the price paid by consumers — roughly doubled between 2021 and 2022, from $531 billion to just over $1 trillion.
• Already this year wildfires in Canada have pumped more than 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, greater than Canada’s total 2021 greenhouse gas emissions of 0.67 gigatons.
• In 2023, there have already been 38 days with global average temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Until this year, such days were a rarity, the authors note.
• The highest average Earth surface temperature ever recorded came this past July, and there’s reason to believe it was the highest surface temperature the planet has seen in the last 100,000 years.

“As scientists, we are hugely troubled by the sudden increases in the frequency and severity of climate-related disasters,” said Wolf, now a scientist with Corvallis-based Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates. “The frequency and severity of those disasters might be outpacing rising temperatures. By the end of the 21st century, as many as 3 to 6 billion people may find themselves outside the Earth’s livable regions, meaning they will be encountering severe heat, limited food availability and elevated mortality rates.”

The authors say policies are needed that take aim at the underlying issue of “ecological overshoot.” When human demand on the Earth’s resources is too large, the result in an array of environmental crises, including biodiversity decline. As long as humanity continues to put extreme pressure on the planet, any strategy that focuses only on carbon or climate will simply redistribute the pressure, they note.

“Our goal is to communicate climate facts and make policy recommendations,” Ripple said. “It is a moral duty of scientists and our institutions to alert humanity of any potential existential threat and to show leadership in taking action.”

The authors urge transitioning to a global economy that prioritizes human well-being and curtails overconsumption and excessive emissions by the rich. Specific recommendations include phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, transitioning toward plant-based diets, scaling up forest protection efforts and adopting international coal elimination and fossil fuel non-proliferation treaties.

They stress that all climate-related actions must be grounded in equity and social justice, noting that extreme weather and other climate impacts are being disproportionately felt by the poorest people, who have contributed the least to climate change.

The circular economy is a vision for a world in which the materials used in the products and packaging we purchase flow perpetually through the economy, used over and over instead of being tossed into landfills and replaced with newly mined, refined, and processed stuff. Recycling, an industry with about 50 years of history, is considered an essential feature of the circular economy, but it is just one option. Our guest, Knoxfill founder Michaela Barnett, recently wrote an article for The Conversation that convincingly argued that recycling has struggled to live up to the circular vision. She says the three Rs — reduce, reuse, and recycle — are insufficient to make the circular economy go round. Michaela started Knoxfill, a retail store in Knoxville, Tennessee, that offers refillable and sustainably made products for hair care, home cleaning, skincare, and the kitchen.

Michaela and her team at Knoxfill offer local delivery and a “mobile refillery,” kind of like a food truck for refills, to make reuse and refilling available as widely as possible within their communities — by keeping the supply chain short using local products and refusing to ship nationally, they help reduce not just plastic consumption but also carbon emissions and other impacts of our daily lives. You can learn more about Knoxfill at https://knoxfill.com/

Take a few minutes to find your local refill options at https://www.litterless.com/ or https://directory.refillerycollective.com/ and start to change your take-make-waste buying to reduce your impact. 

The 17 experts, including Prof Robert Nicholls, Professor of Climate Adaptation at the University of East Anglia (UEA), have contributed to the paper, ‘Status of global coastal adaptation’, which is published today in Nature Climate Change.

Prof Nicholls said: “Recent analyses conclude that despite adaptation undertaken in all regions and sectors, global action remains incremental in scale: policies and projects are usually short-sighted and single hazard-focused, inadequately address the root causes of exposure and vulnerability, and are poorly monitored. There is also little evidence of effective risk reduction in relation to implemented responses.”

To address these problems, the experts say decisive action by the international policy community is needed to identify and tackle global priorities in key risk areas across countries.

Dr Alexandre Magnan, of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), is first author of the paper.

Dr Magnan said: “Assessing climate adaptation is a burning scientific and policy question because, as today’s global climate risk will experience a two- to four-fold increase by the end of this century depending on the global greenhouse gas emissions trajectory, we need to know the current status toward addressing its consequences.

“New, alternative methods to assess adaptation are urgently needed in order carry out effective planning and action, evidence on risk reduction, capabilities and create a long-term vision.”

The paper considered 61 coastal case studies to develop a locally informed perspective on the state of global coastal adaptation. It looked at both extreme events and low-onset climate change, including coastal erosion, marine flooding, sea-level rise and extremes, soil and groundwater salinization, inland flooding resulting from heavy precipitations, and permafrost thaw.

While strategies for urban coastal areas are generally more advanced than rural ones, the experts said plans for long-term adaptations remain limited.

The experts concluded that today’s global coastal adaptation is half-way to the full adaptation potential.

Taking sea-level rise as one example, the experts said the risks to low-lying coasts are already detectable.

Prof Nicholls said: “By the end of the century and in the absence of ambitious adaptation efforts, these risks will become significant, widespread and possibly irreversible in atolls and arctic coasts. The lower estimates for deltas are still a concern given these geographies’ population sizes and economic importance globally.”

The expert group developed a qualitative structured judgment — the Global Adaptation Progress Tracker (GAP-Track) — to assess adaptation efforts, progress and gaps, as part of the framework for the Global Goal on Adaptation established under the Paris Agreement in 2015.

Dr Magnan said: “Countries still struggle finding a way to operationalize the Global Goal on Adaptation and to conduct the Global Stocktake (GST) series that aims to collectively track adaptation progress and gaps, with a first iteration due at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates.

“The multi-dimensional and locally grounded assessment developed in this study for coastal adaptation confirms the need to drastically scale up adaptation policy and action around the globe, from local governments and stakeholders to the international climate policy arena.

“We are arguing that the approach developed in this paper can play a decisive role in helping refine both targets and priorities.”

Crop residues are an important resource in agriculture. They contribute carbon to the soil, increase soil fertility and play an important role in the agricultural ecosystem, but they also play a role in relation to energy supply and recycling of nutrients. Crop residues can be very diverse and have widely different composition and properties. They can be cover crops, grass, grass-clover, vegetables, straw, etc. They may consist of residues from roots or from aboveground crop parts.

“All in all, there is large diversity in the quality of the crop residues that are added to the soil as part of the general cultivation practice,” says Professor and Department head Jørgen E. Olesen from the Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University.

He has headed a new scientific study highlighting the differences in crop residues and how they affect nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural fields in different ways.

“Crop residues are essential for maintaining soil fertility, and in addition, they play a major role in maintaining or increasing the carbon content in the soil. Unfortunately, they also contribute to the emission of nitrous oxide,” says Jørgen E. Olesen.

Clash with current emission inventories

IPCC — The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — prepares guidelines for how to make national inventories of greenhouse gas emissions, including nitrous oxide emissions, when crop residues are returned to the fields.

Fact box: IPCC — The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (FN´s Klimapanel)

The IPCC is an international organisation established in 1988 by the World Meteorology Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The purpose of the IPCC is to assess scientific knowledge about climate change, its causes, impacts and possible adaptation and mitigation strategies.

The IPCC plays a key role in gathering and assessing the latest scientific literature on climate change and preparing reports that inform politicians and decision-makers worldwide. IPCC reports are used as the basis for international climate negotiations and policy development.

The organisation is known for publishing comprehensive assessments of climate science, including reports on greenhouse gases, sea level rises, temperature changes and other aspects of climate change.

The work of the IPCC therefore plays a crucial role in understanding and managing climate change at global level.

The IPCC’s inventory method includes nitrous oxide from crop residues such as annual cereal and seed crops, root crops, vegetables, fodder crops and grassland renewal.

“Non-harvestable crops such as cover crops are not taken into account,” explains Jørgen E. Olesen, who adds that the biochemical properties of crop residues and their degradability of carbon and nitrogen are also not included in the accounting of emissions.

“The current method only considers the nitrogen content in the plant residues, but our studies show that the degradability of carbon in plant residues actually is more important. There is therefore a need for an improved accounting method so that inventories are accurate and mitigation measures can be effective,” says Jørgen E. Olesen.

Difference between ripe and unripe crop residues

According to the researchers, there may be large differences in how much nitrous oxide the crop residues emit.

“Many different factors come into play when you look at the extent of nitrous oxide emissions from crop residues. A very important factor is the concentration of degradable carbon and nitrogen. When the concentration is high, the potential for producing nitrous oxide also increases,” says Jørgen E. Olesen.

You often see a high concentration of both easily degradable carbon and nitrogen in immature crop residues, such as cover crops, grass, legumes and vegetables, while mature crop residues such as straw do not have such high concentrations.

“A distinction between mature and immature crop residues could help to ensure a more accurate estimation of the short-term effects of crop residues on nitrous oxide emissions. For the more long-term effects, i.e., years and decades, we should account for the residual effects on soil quality and nitrogen content. They are affected by local climatic conditions, just as the soil conditions are of importance,” says Jørgen E. Olesen.

Targeted mitigation of nitrous oxide emissions

“There is a critical need for new and targeted strategies when it comes to reducing nitrous oxide from crop residues. Globally, approx. 9% of agricultural emissions of nitrous oxide stem from the input of crop residues to the fields. However, such strategies require that the accounting of emissions from crop residues becomes more accurate,” says Jørgen E. Olesen.

A distinction between mature and immature crop residues may be an approach that, according to the researchers, could improve the accuracy of the inventories. It will also improve the possibilities of targeting and finding appropriate mitigation strategies.

“Reviewing how we calculate emissions from specific crop residues and determine the right time and place to use them requires more research. There are also important questions in the research into emissions from crop residues that we still need to answer,” says Jørgen E. Olesen, who points out that there is a need for more research into:

• Develop and validate nitrous oxide emission factors for mature and immature crop residues
• Assess emissions from belowground residues from harvested crops
• Improve data on managing different types of crop residues, especially immature residues
• Evaluate long-term effects of crop residues inputs on nitrous oxide emissions

Cellulose is a wonderful material for making hydrogels — which are used in applications ranging from contact lenses to wound care and drug delivery. But creating hydrogels from cellulose is tricky, and often the processes used to create the hydrogels are themselves toxic.

“Normally, you have to first dissolve the cellulose and then induce it to crosslink or form the structure of interest, which often requires the use of difficult to handle, unstable, or toxic solvents,” says Lucian Lucia, professor of forest biomaterials and chemistry at NC State and co-corresponding author of the work.

Enter the Swift family of birds — small birds who use their saliva to hold twigs in place when building their nests.

“My then Ph.D. student Zhen Zhang noted that when birds do this, the saliva acts like a natural resin that holds the nest together and encourages the fibers within the nest to interconnect or crosslink,” Lucia says. “Which is exactly what we want the dissolved cellulose to do when making hydrogels. So we asked ourselves, ‘what if we mimic the birds?'”

Zhang, currently a postdoc at Texas Tech University, is a co-corresponding author.

The researchers added a water soluble cellulose called carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) to an acid solution and dissolved the CMC. Then they added powdered cellulose fiber to the solution and subjected it to four rounds of freezing and thawing. The result was cellulose gel.

“Think of it as adding a thickener to water, like you would a pie filling,” Lucia says. “By changing the pH of the CMC, the water essentially becomes sticky. Freezing and thawing the solution causes the cellulose to compact and interweave itself into the sticky network, giving you a more organized structure, just as Swifts do when they create their nests. Only we don’t have to use beaks and saliva to do it.”

Freeze drying the gels resulted in cellulose foam. The researchers repeated the process with bamboo fibers as well, which suggests that it could be useful with many other lignin and cellulose containing fibers.

“The cellulose gels are robust, stable at room temperature and can be tuned to degrade on a schedule, so would be useful in drug delivery applications, among others,” Lucia says. “This opens a promising new window for using biomimicry to process these insoluble cellulosic materials in a greener way.”

The work appears in Advanced Composites and Hybrid Materials. Noureddine Abidi of Texas Tech University is a co-corresponding author of the work.