Well with the University of Wisconsin-Madison finding a way to make electronics made to be biodegradeable, do you believe the push will be made to stop the ever increasing amount of electronic waste that keeps piling up year after year?
I'd like to see a push as it would dramatically lower the amount of waste, the main problem is making it cost effective. Is this something that is going to be looked into faster with more funding or is this on the back burners?
While biodegradable electronics is surely a fantastic step, I feel that a greater steps would be increasing recycle/reusability of electronics and the development of technology which requires less rare, expensive and toxic resources. Is there much research into the latter and has it yielded any valuable fruit?
It is an interesting idea, to have our electronics biodegradable. On one hand, we do have a lot of electronic waste that has no need to be building up as much as we let it be. On the other hand, I think we also should stop being such a 'disposable' society, and demand a longer lifespan from the gadgets we use.
There is always something better coming out. Not to say the stuff we have is bad because somethings, like my galaxy S4, will last a long time because I won't need the new features. However, as performance and speed increases means that electronics outdate very quickly and some people really do want the new shiny thing. I find that spending a little bit more money on electronics to get ahead tends to last much longer. Another problem with biodegradable electronics I can see is some of the metals used are either toxic or something we should be recycling anyways. While it be neat to see the plastic waste be reduced, it doesn't prevent the other waste from contaminating the environment. At least it is a start but not a full solution.
If we demanded longer lifespans for our computing and gadget devices, we'd be implicitly agreeing to a slower pace of technology advances. I have to upgrade cpus and gpus every 2-4 years not because they're cheaply made and wear out, but because the newer ones are 40-50% more powerful than what I bought a short time ago and that's the hardware new programs will be developed for.
I would agree with the point of demanding a longer lifespan of gadgets. One problem I see everyone making simply for the amount of money spent now is buying the "old" laptops or competers and replacing them every year, maybe two. Yes, there are times financials are tough so I do understand but others could buy a little better product to last longer. Also mobile cell phones. Industry is huge and not going away. Contracts are for two years, there are even shorter contracts you can get now so you can replace the "old" phone with a year newer model. I guess I don't have too much room to talk, I have 4 smartphones (all sitting in my backpacks front pocket) from 3 years of having a data plan. It's so ingrained in our society to have the best and newest phone that company's have taken complete advantage and are releasing their new models yearly with technical specs that made little to no difference half the time. Seeing phones last longer than they do now would be a great improvement. I am very interested in seeing how this all plays out as we should find at least some way to slow down waste.