>> Electronics recycling is rarely done the way you or I would expect.
[dramatic music plays] [voices heard in background]
>> Discarded computers are often shipped to developing countries, where they mine them
for raw materials.
[music continues] [fire crackles]
>> There are hundreds of scrap yards just like this one…
all over the world.
[dramatic music continues] [sound of mallet hitting e-waste; metals and
platics] [fire crackling sound]
[man breathing hard]
[dramatic music continues]
[voices shouting in background]
[dramatic music continues]
[music changes to soft piano] >> I shot the footage you just saw
and I’ve seen first-hand the devastation caused by our throw-away culture.
Kyle contines: The life span of electronics is getting shorter
and shorter causing incredible growth in e-waste shipments
to the developing world. Electronic waste is actually toxic.
Computer boards have arsenic, mercury, lead, and environmentally devastating polybrominated
flame retardants. The people I met who I met burn these computers
to extract the copper don't know they are breathing in these toxic
chemicals. They’re burning our waste and it’s our
responsibility. We need to come together and find the solution
to this toxic problem. We can’t continue to manufacture hundreds
of millions of electronic devices every year, rapidly consuming them and then tossing them
away. Fortunately this is a solvable problem.
We can dramatically reduce the number of devices that end up in landfills
by just making them work longer. we need to,
no we must make it possible, even easy, for people to fix their own electronics.
If we could double the useful life of the devices we consume,
we could cut the amount of e-waste in half. Imagine if everyone in the world had free
access to repair information. How many more things would people fix?
How long could we make things last? [music changes from piano to upbeat orchestrated
piece] We are writing a free step by step repair
manual for every device. This is a monumental Wikipedia-scale task.
We are manufacturing new kinds of devices at an unprecedented pace
and if we don’t act now we will lose the opportunity to fix these devices
while they still have economic value. But like many big, hard problems, this is
also something that we must do. Something that we can do.
We need help from people all over the world. I need your help to show people how to fix
everything. ifixit has already empowered hundreds of thousands
of people to fix things themselves. Try it out yourself. Take something apart
that doesn’t work, understand the problem enough that you can
fix it and then put it back together.
It is the greatest feeling in the world when it turns on
and you know that you fixed it. It’s so exciting to know that you can have
control of your own hardware. That you can fix it if something happens and
that you can be self reliant and reduce your environmental footprint.
We need your help to make things last longer. I don’t know how to fix everything,
but I know how to fix some things and I’m eager to share what I know.
I can imagine a world where people have free access to a repair manual for everything.
I can imagine a time when people fix things when they break and where parents teach their
children to value the things that they own. I can imagine a culture built around the joy
of making and repairing things, rather than just using things up and tossing
them away. I can imagine people starting small repair
businesses all over the world using freely available service manuals.
I can imagine a future where technology is a sustainable part of our lives,
empowering us all to work together to make the world a better place.
[music fades]