New York City now has electronics recycling drop-off days all over the city four times a year, organized by the Lower East Side Ecology Center. All those materials go to a recycler that is in full operation. That recycler is extracting all sorts of materials and selling them. People thought that paper recycling was crazy when it started, now NYC makes a profit from it, and now, people steal the paper from the curbside because its worth money. Now its great that more of this toxic material is being recycled, but if we go back to the 3 Rs, there are two things we should be doing first: reduce and reuse.

For now, let’s talk about reuse. You don’t need to solder to reuse stuff. Most of the electronics that people discard still work fine. And most of it is far more powerful than a microcontroller like the Arduino. The software is a main limitation, its currently not very easy to put your own software on your own phone or iPod. That is mostly because the restrictions the manufactures create for putting your own software on devices, they put a lot of work into making it really difficult to install software on these devices.

It is true to a degree that a 10 year old mobile phone is limited, but that view is very short-sighted. A good example is Apple computer versus most others. They are generally built much more solid and made to be upgradeable. Therefore people use them for a much longer time, and they have a much higher resale value. I sold my 5 year old, broken PowerBook G4. A 3 year old Dell costs that much. Since the parts are easier to swap, lots of people frankenstein working powerbooks out of old ones. Few people do this with PCs since they are just not built for it (sadly, it seems that Apple is making it harder to swap parts with their newer MacBooks).

Imagine if phones, iPods, and PDAs were made to be upgradable? Personally, I get quite attached to the physical shape, size and feel of my daily device, and there is always a big adjustment period. But if I could install my own software and upgrade the hardware, I would change much less frequently. Like computers and laptops have, mobile devices are now maturing and they aren’t really changing that much. For example, my 2005 Palm TX has a screen with the same resolution and capabilities as the latest iPhone (320×480). My 2003 Sharp Zaurus has a much better screen than almost all phones out there (640×480, still very bright, and more colors that most).

So the problem really is nothing inherent in the problems of making computers small and mobile. The central problem is really that the business models of telecoms encourage people to throw away working devices and buy new ones. A number of laptop companies sell computers that last many years, and make good money doing it. It is not hard to make money selling devices where people can always upgrade the software and the hardware. And ISPs make money selling all-you-can-eat bandwidth for a monthly fee. We need to think of our phones, devices, media players, etc. as little computers and treating them accordingly.