How Products Get Designed
Here’s how products get made. A company works with their marketing department to develop a new product. After a bunch of market research, the executives come up with a vision of the product.
The design department then works with marketing to come up with a cool looking product.
Finally, the engineering department gets the design and product vision, and is asked to make it work. The engineers need to come up with a design based on the supplier that sells them individual electronic components.
The important parts of this process are:
1) The engineer knows the company can get the parts when they need them.
2) The engineer knows the prices of the parts so the product can make money.
E-WASTE & RECYCLING
Raw Materials
The individual parts that make up a product ultimately come from the earth in the form of raw materials.
Raw materials need to be dug up and refined into something consistent that manufacturers can use.
Examples are trees get turned into lumber and rocks get melted into things like steel and copper.
This requires a lot of energy and time, therefore costing money.
Components
Raw materials, after being turned into a refined product, then get converted into components.
These are the parts that make up products.
Electronic components need to be predictable to manufacturers, so they can design their products around the various electrical, temperature, and other specifications of the component.
Even the dimensions of the component must be stated so that the product can be built in exactly the same way every time.
The core idea here is that product manufactures require consistency and predictability in their parts.
This leads us to quality control and gambling.
Quality Control
Here’s how many manufactures test and build their products.
They make a batch, and test a few from each batch. If the ones they test seem fine, they assume everything is probably fine.
If there’s a problem that slips through, they assume the consumer will simply return the product to the store and receive another product.
If this happens too much, the company then looks more deeply into their process to try and figure out how to refine it.
If this happens way too much, and enough consumers get together and launch a class-action lawsuit, the company then goes to court and may have to pay a certain amount to everyone who bought the product.
This whole process is based on various stages of risk management. If the company makes mostly educated guesses, then things should work out most of the time.
If the right amount of profit is built into the product, then the company should make enough money to cover the costs associated with any problems that come up.
This is essentially a form of gambling, but it precisely this educated and engineered form of gambling that has been refined by modern business since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Since there is a lot of money to be made by anyone who can offer a company the opportunity to save money, there are many experts, tools and research to make this process as effective as it is today.
Product End-of-Life
Once a product has been purchased and used, it eventually becomes worn-out, broken, or unappealing.
In the case of computer, the latter relates to obsolescence. Once a computer becomes too old, it often is unable to run the current software in a way that’s appealing the user.
Usually the the user buys a newer computer, and often the old computer is eventually disposed of.
Computers and electronic components are designed to be used in-tact, so all the chemicals inside aren’t designed to be safe for consumption by humans. Computer’s aren’t food, so they don’t have to be good for you.
When the computer is put into a landfill, it is likely the materials used to make the components of the computer will leak out.
These materials are often very harmful to plants, animals, and humans if eaten, drank, bathed in, or consumed in any other way.
E-Waste Problems
The products and chemicals used to created electronics can be very harmful, especially if the e-waste has contaminated the drinking water or soil.
Some of the harmful chemicals include: lead, mercury and hexavalent chromium. There is a potential for these toxins to seep into the ground and affect our water and the air we breathe.
Although governments are starting to create new rules and guidelines for how electronics get made, this only addresses the front-end of the manufacturing process.
Currently, the back end involves, at best, the collecting of
e-waste and the safe destruction of it, or perhaps the recycling of the base materials. This includes gold, copper, and other valuable metals.
But all the value-added aspects of the products, as well as the electronic components themselves, are lost. This process throws away any energy that’s been spent creating something useful.
Any waste of energy ultimately has an effect on the environments in the form of wasted electricity.
But there’s also the human element. We’ve come accustomed to an electronics throw-away attitude. A culture of constant disposable electronics
If you want to learn more about E-Waste, the Wikipedia article is a great starting point. Click here to read more. More information will be posted on the Flytrap Gear Wiki as it matures.
Illegal Recycling
Another huge problem with e-waste is the cost. It’s currently more expensive than it’s worth.
As a result, the e-waste gets moved to the lowest bidder. This is often developing areas in developed countries, or even poorer third world countries.
Typically, e-waste is collected in North America, boxed up into shipping containers, and sent to developing countries, where illegal recycling towns have moved from farming to recycling.
These towns can resemble giant junk yards, with electronics often being burned or chemically dissolved to extract the trace elements of precious metals.
This has created enormous problems in the local water supply, soil, air, and health of the people who engage in this activity.
The Role of Government
Governments are a key element to this problem. Although there is much work currently being done by the governments around the world, there are other ways of making things happen.
Although encouraging and people educating people is a start, why not something more novel?
The entrepreneurial spirit has shown to have the ability to create rapid change.
This website is hoping to stoke the flames of creative entrepreneurs, by showing them the potential to turn e-waste into a highly niche, value added, and good margin business.
Resources do not exist that answer a simple question:
“With what I have, what can I make and sell?”
This has been a barrier to any electronics repair-person or recycler; it’s the gap between what’s possible and information about what’s inside the electronics.
This website seeks to fill that gap.
An Enterprising Solution
The gap between what’s possible and what you have is vast. A single class of products, like a CD-ROM drive inside a computer, may contain different components, even though the products all come from the same class of products. Even the same manufacturers may have different components when comparing products of the same model number.
This website, through a community sourced wiki, will scan in, label, and link to the datasheets of the components inside electronics. So builders can make the links between design and what they have, without having to dismantle everything and do the manual research.
This website will also create generalized descriptions of the products, so that even if the product someone has in their hands isn’t in the wiki, they should be able to make informed guesses about what to expect.
The wiki will also have circuits, as well as generalized descriptions of circuits, so that builder can create their own designs based on what e-waste they have.
The result will be the ability to “connect the dots” between what you have and what you can make.
As the site grows, it also our goal to create resources to help local builders market and sell their great products.
Once this becomes more mainstream, it will have a strong effect on electronics companies. A large DIY movement will put consumer market pressure on manufacturers to explore new options, and to demonstrate the potentially new markets recycled electronics will create.
What You Can Do!
If you want to help, there’s many ways but, it starts by
spreading the word!
You probably know people who have the spirits or skills to get involved.
It might be someone who’s technically savvy, or someone who wants to be!
It might be someone who cares about the environment.
It might be someone who likes scanning in circuit boards and emailing them to this website.
It might be someone who likes looking up datasheets and updating the wiki with the information.
It might just be someone who’s got a closet full of computers and is looking for someone local to pick them up.
Or it might be someone who just wants to buy some killer musical effects, and wants to help support the builders in the process.
In any case, the best thing is to be aware of the issue.
E-Waste is a real problem,
but we can rise to the challenge,
have fun doing it, and
make the world a better place!
Anything is possible!
