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Much of what gets laid out in the article is also true for a whole range of other disposable products of different types. Take plastic bottles, essentially the

by stinos 7y ago

Much of what gets laid out in the article is also true for a whole range of other disposable products of different types. Take plastic bottles, essentially the same tragedy. Companies like Apple did and still do fairly well when it comes to innovation and planting ideas in people's head. If only they would use that creativity to make it cool again to own less products which at the same last longer and are upgradable/servicable, some of the tragedy could be alleviated.

nanaya 7y ago
Here's difference between airpods and plastic bottles: > They can’t be repaired because they're glued together. They can’t be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell.
- zoul 7y ago
  It would be interesting to ask Apple how much they manage to recycle from the AirPods and how. Would that be asking too much from the article author?
  - dngray 7y ago
    It's not something that Apple openly markets as being a reason why you should buy them so my guess would be a lot less than you think, because of cost to do so. Whereas with Macbooks they openly tout that https://www.apple.com/environment/ https://www.apple.com/environment/ "Built to last as long as humanly possible." -- Apple That doesn't sound like an Airpod to me.
    - zoul 7y ago
      No it doesn’t, agreed. But I imagine the design constraints for a notebook vs. wireless headphones are pretty different. I am amazed that the thing can be built at all.
duskwuff 7y ago
And there are a lot of common technology products which are much worse than AirPods in terms of their net environmental impact. Consider disposable e-cigarettes, for instance -- these typically contain a lithium-ion battery of comparable size to the one in an AirPod, but are designed to be used once and thrown away.

by stinos 7y ago

nanaya 7y ago

Here's difference between airpods and plastic bottles: > They can’t be repaired because they're glued together. They can’t be thrown out, or else the lithium-ion battery may start a fire in the garbage compactor. They can’t be easily recycled, because there’s no safe way to separate the lithium-ion battery from the plastic shell.

zoul 7y ago
It would be interesting to ask Apple how much they manage to recycle from the AirPods and how. Would that be asking too much from the article author?
- dngray 7y ago
  It's not something that Apple openly markets as being a reason why you should buy them so my guess would be a lot less than you think, because of cost to do so. Whereas with Macbooks they openly tout that https://www.apple.com/environment/ https://www.apple.com/environment/ "Built to last as long as humanly possible." -- Apple That doesn't sound like an Airpod to me.
  - zoul 7y ago
    No it doesn’t, agreed. But I imagine the design constraints for a notebook vs. wireless headphones are pretty different. I am amazed that the thing can be built at all.

duskwuff 7y ago

And there are a lot of common technology products which are much worse than AirPods in terms of their net environmental impact. Consider disposable e-cigarettes, for instance -- these typically contain a lithium-ion battery of comparable size to the one in an AirPod, but are designed to be used once and thrown away.