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Voices: iFixit’s Kyle Wiens: extending electronics’ life span

iFixit’s Kyle Wiens has developed an understanding of the cradle-to-grave life cycle of electronic products, as well as an appreciation for how people salvage, repair, and reuse electronics in developing countries.

By Margery Conner, Technical Editor -- EDN, 1/21/2010

Kyle Wiens is the co-founder and chief executive officer of iFixit, a parts retailer for the iMac, iPhone, iPod, and similar products. The company is often the first to publish teardowns—inside glances into the electronics—of Apple products. From its origins in a dorm room at California State Polytechnic Institute—San Luis Obispo in 2003, iFixit has morphed into a collaborative repair community for electronic consumer goods that might otherwise end up in a landfill after a few years of use. Along the way, Wiens developed an understanding of the cradle-to-grave life cycle of an electronic product, including the environmental cost of e-waste—electronics that end up in the trash—as well as an appreciation for how people salvage, repair, and reuse electronics in developing countries.

How did you become aware of the implications of the cradle-to-grave life cycle of electronics?

We got our start selling parts for iBooks, and the only way to get replacement parts was to buy old iBooks off eBay and scavenge them for parts. It’s not usually worth our time to work on PC knockoffs, but Mac laptops are about the most expensive computers out there. Then, this summer, I went to Africa and spent three months researching what happens to our e-waste. For example, CRT displays are virtually obsolete here [in the United States], but in Africa they can have another life. Scavengers salvage CRTs from landfills that still work but have yellowed cases. They paint them white and sell them. The problem is with the stuff that’s marginally working or is dead. That’s where they have a challenging time because they’re working through large volumes of stuff, and, if it isn’t immediately clear how to fix it, it’s not necessarily worth their time to figure it out. They’re hoping to make maybe $5 a day, which they can reasonably do working on CRT displays.

Why did you go to Africa?

I’m trying to show people how people fix things in developing countries. You get a power supply that’s not functional; where do they get information on how electronics work? One way is to "hyperspecialize." One person works on power supplies while another one works on a type of cell-phone logic board, repairing traces on cell-phone boards when the physical board itself is cracked. It’s pretty impressive. They don’t do things the "right" way—ever. They use brute force; they get things done. But once they get something figured out, then that’s their niche in the community. That’s the same anywhere: You find something that you’re good at, and you focus on it. There’s a Swahili term for it—"jua kali" [literally, "hot sun"]—and the closest I can come to it is our term "hackers."

I went to one six-story building in downtown Nairobi [Kenya] that was full of electronics-repair businesses, some doing specialized repair and some reselling CRTs and TVs. Out of chaos emerges some organization, with people clawing a niche for themselves.

What can we in the United States do to move the world away from throwaway electronics?

We need to try to push the electronics green standards to include reliability. Even the environmentally friendly ROHS [reduction of hazardous substances], which is causing a switch away from lead-based solder, dramatically reduces the reliability of electronics. Look at the military: It requires lead-based solder because it understands the reliability problems. When [iFixit is] working on boards with non-lead-based solder, the job is four times more difficult. I’m not sure that switching away from lead solder is the most environmentally friendly thing to do in the long run.

What should engineers keep in mind to minimize e-waste when designing products?

The number one thing is to not build products with consumables like lithium batteries that are not user-replaceable. A lithium battery has only 200 cycles; you can’t in good conscience not allow the user to replace it. For example, Apple has a nonreplaceable battery in the iPhone, which I think is the wrong decision. Motorola has made the Droid [cell phone] so that you can replace the battery and has made it a selling point, but Motorola can get hurt with that [if the company has] issues with the battery cover because it’s one more moving part. If there’s any bad public relations about that for Motorola, then the company might just solder the back cover on, and then it’s no longer user-replaceable.

Designing a product for future expansion is also important, such as using a MicroSD card instead of built-in flash memory. I should not have to throw away my iPhone and get a new one to upgrade from 8 to 16 Gbytes. I’m sympathetic with people who want to get the new iPod Nano this year, but what happens to the old one? So it’s not cool enough for you, but it’s cool enough for someone, and, as long as it still works, someone should be able to use it. Look at Sandisk; it makes the low-end, $30 Sansa MP3 players. When the company gets them as RMAs [return-materials authorization], it just chucks them. The company doesn’t even test them and doesn’t have internal service manuals because it has internalized the cost of repair. I think that’s a travesty. Sandisk needs to be releasing open-license repair manuals with devices.

I visited a recycling place in South Africa where they get the same machine coming through their place four to five times. Every few years, the machine would come back as the owner upgraded, and the recycler would sell it back to someone farther out in the country. If you’ve just gotten electricity out in a village and you run a little dry-goods shop, being able to run VisiCalc on an Apple II can change your life. We [in the United States] have forgotten the magic of how powerful the technology that we had 10 years ago was and how it can revolutionize life.