SOCIAL: Fwd: Introducing iPhone 4.

Mon Jun 7 23:16:54 PDT 2010

Geoff,

You're misunderstanding term cradle to cradle -- not your cradle --  
the product's.

Looking forward to the day I can grow my latest phone :)

Adrian

On Jun 7, 2010, at 10:03 PM, Geoff Davis <geoff at geoffdavis.net> wrote:

> Thinking about the kinds of phones that were available when I was in  
> the cradle, it would make me very sad if I were stuck with a cradle- 
> to-cradle phone.  I'd be lugging around a 10 pound stainless steel  
> rotary dial phone with 500 yards of really heavily reinforced cord  
> while everyone else rocked out on their iPhones.
>
> I think it all boils down to this:
> Fixing stuff is really expensive because it requires skilled labor  
> (expensive).
> Making new mass produced stuff is cheap because the skilled labor  
> all happens in the design phase, and the design cost gets spread out  
> over everything you make.
> Until that changes, it's going to be a lot easier to make new stuff  
> than to fix existing stuff.
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Tom Radulovich <tomrad at well.com>  
> wrote:
> I would feel better about so much of this stuff if it was recyclable  
> or compostable. If computers are only supposed to last a few years,  
> why not a compostable casing, like hardboard, instead of toxic beige  
> plastic? Same thing with the semi-disposable furniture. What if the  
> particle board furniture could be composted once the furniture fell  
> apart? Coating particle board with Melamine resin precludes that.
>
> I'd happily buy a cradle-to-cradle iPhone.
>
>
> On Jun 7, 2010, at 6:55 PM, Kelly hawk wrote:
>
>> I may be quoting out of context and misattributing... but I believe  
>> one of the national leaders of the german Green party once said  
>> "commerce is bad for the environment." AKA, the less we buy, the  
>> better off the earth is. So the fact that my employer sells  
>> anything at all is in some sense bad for the environment, even if  
>> they made toilet paper from grass. But the desire for new powerful  
>> phones exists, some company will fill it. It might as well be as  
>> recyclable as possible.
>> I think desktop computers have reached the point of diminishing  
>> returns on frequent churn. I have useful PC's in my home that are  
>> nearly 10 years old and will probably continue to be useful for  
>> another 5 or 10 - new desktops today don't do much more than the  
>> old ones. They're just faster with bigger screens, so making  
>> durable desktops make sense. Someday phones will hopefully get to  
>> the same place, and it will be appropriate to make cell phones that  
>> could last 10-15 years. It makes no sense to make a phone that  
>> durable today; technology is changing too quickly, so the extra  
>> material that went into making it durable would be wasteful for the  
>> majority of customers. Likewise with furniture and real wood. If  
>> you want nice furniture that you'll own the rest of your life,  
>> it'll cost $4,000 and it'll be hard wood (I have several such  
>> pieces, and I intend to have them reupholstered until I can't see  
>> anymore). Otherwise, it'll be made from cheap pressboard (which is  
>> generally post-consumer waste, or at least waste the mill will have  
>> burned if not for pressboard). Seems like reasonable environmental  
>> harm reduction.
>> -- Kelly --
>>
>> On Jun 7, 2010, at 5:56 PM, Erin Milnes wrote:
>>
>>> I had to part with my Mom’s Sunbeam mixer, as it just couldn’t c 
>>> ream butter anymore (it had had a good run, maybe even 35 years) 
>>> . Really made me sad, though -- I learned to bake with it as a g 
>>> irl by her side (and got to lick the batter off its beaters!). I 
>>>  also had to give up on my stepmother’s old ‘portable’  
>>> Singer, when it couldn’t be reliably repaired, but it, too, was  
>>> probably 40 years old.
>>>
>>> Don’t get me started on shoes and clothing. I have dresses that  
>>> are probably 40 and 50 years old and look fine, and my son has w 
>>> orn some of my brother’s baby clothes, which I know are 50 years 
>>>  old. I even have two blouses that belonged to my grandmother, w 
>>> ho was born in 1895. They are delicate but still wearable. I hav 
>>> e shoes and clothes that I bought as a teenager, too. Have sever 
>>> al of my Mom’s old aprons ... the list goes on.
>>>
>>> And furniture... what happened to building with real wood? Press  
>>> board doesn’t last, and you can’t give it away after a few years 
>>> . (Sal Army will not pick up press board furniture donations.)
>>>
>>> The esprit de corps around keeping and reusing definitely seems to  
>>> be different now than it was when I grew up and when I was a young  
>>> adult. I think there’s also a bit of a West Coast thing going on 
>>>  (too hard to schlep antiques across the country). Maybe my fami 
>>> ly was unusual, maybe it’s a Midwestern thing, or maybe because  
>>> I grew up with a grandmother who guided her family through the D 
>>> epression (including dealing with losing their house), the belie 
>>> f that waste is sinful was instilled in me.
>>>
>>> There’s no doubt that obsolescence is planned into many products 
>>>  and plain old low-quality is the rule for most others. I like t 
>>> o feel the years in a tool and touch those memories when I hold  
>>> it, though there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a new outfit or g 
>>> adget too. It’s important to have a balance. Tom, I think your e 
>>> arlier caution about consumption is very on the mark.
>>>
>>> I’m not sure why/how the values around consumption and waste in  
>>> this country have changed so much since I was a kid, but maybe w 
>>> e can all spiral back to less waste-creating beliefs in an even  
>>> better form.
>>>
>>> Erin
>>>
>>> From: social-bounces at lists.deeptrouble.com [mailto:social- 
>>> bounces at lists.deeptrouble.com] On Behalf Of Tom Radulovich
>>> Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 5:26 PM
>>> To: Social
>>> Subject: Re: SOCIAL: Fwd: Introducing iPhone 4.
>>>
>>> After I sent this, I looked around at the dead electronics in  
>>> view, and tried to imagine the tons and tons of water, oil, coal,  
>>> ore, trees, etc. that went into making them, and the tons of  
>>> carbon dioxide, soot, mine tailings, fly ash, hydrocarbon sludge,  
>>> etc. that they left as waste; it would fill the room I am in  
>>> several times over - perhaps the entire building! Sobering.
>>>
>>> Then I think about my aunt's KitchenAid mixer, or my grandmother's  
>>> chairs, flour sifter, and rolling pin, which still serve me well  
>>> although they are all older than I am.
>>>
>>> Some folks are thinking about designing things in very different  
>>> ways. Worldchanging had an article about designing for durability  
>>> and continued usefulness –  "heirloom design" which I quite like 
>>> d. Think about a fine pen or a watch you can imagine leaving to  
>>> your grandchildren (or grandnieces and grandnephews)
>>>
>>> http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009630.html
>>>
>>> I imagine that at some point, technology will stabilize, and many  
>>> devices will do pretty much everything you need them to do, and do  
>>> it elegantly. Apple makes quite elegant products, if not  
>>> particularly durable ones. Maybe one day there will be the mobile  
>>> phone equivalent of the KitchenAid mixer, that will last for  
>>> decades.
>>>
>>> On Jun 7, 2010, at 5:03 PM, Amandeep Jawa wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> What Tom said is how it is.
>>>
>>> I will only add that that is why Apple has very consciously moved  
>>> to making things out of high grade aluminum and glass rather than  
>>> plastic.  We have pointed out numerous times that we do this  
>>> because these materials (particularly the high grade versions we  
>>> use) are sought after in recycling because they are the most  
>>> valuable.
>>>
>>> I'm not saying that is everything, but it is something.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jun 7, 2010, at 4:40 PM, Tom Radulovich wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> It's an excellent point, Palak. These machines are the product of  
>>> a culture that plans in obsolescence. Even if you want to hold on  
>>> to them (as I do, not necessarily out of virtue, but rather  
>>> because I am cheap, and don't like to have to learn how to use new  
>>> gadgets) they aren't made to last, or the company that makes them  
>>> quickly stops supporting them. As I write this, I am sitting in an  
>>> office with four non-working printers that need to be disposed of.  
>>> I just took a bunch of mobile-phone chargers to Goodwill for  
>>> electronics recycling yesterday, and was reminded of how wasteful  
>>> (and expensive!) it is that every phone seems to have a unique  
>>> charger – while I understand that the EU now requires that all p 
>>> hones sold in Europe from now on have a standard charger, it see 
>>> ms a way off here in the US.
>>>
>>> I started reading John Thackara's book, In the Bubble, which is  
>>> about design. He has a great chapter on how much waste that the  
>>> electronics industry generates:
>>>
>>> "Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information  
>>> technology is heavy in itself. It's a heavy user of matter in all  
>>> the hardware needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the  
>>> misnamed sillicon age is the material and energy flows involved in  
>>> the manufacture and use of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of  
>>> materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access  
>>> memory - a total of 630 times the mass of the final product. The  
>>> "fab" of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life  
>>> span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip's weight  
>>> in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used  
>>> in the manufacturing process. A single microchip is, it is true, a  
>>> small thing – on its own. But there are a lot of them about – an 
>>> d many more to come. Promoters of ubiquitous computing promise u 
>>> s that trillions of smart embedded devices are on the way.
>>>
>>> " The ecological footprint of computing is not limited to the  
>>> chips. The manufacture of electronic devices also involves highly  
>>> intensive material processes. A great deal of nature has to be  
>>> moved during the production of communications equipment. Many  
>>> components require the use of high-grade minerals that can be  
>>> obtained only through major mining operations and energy-intensive  
>>> transformation processes. One of the most startling pieces of  
>>> information brought to light in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and  
>>> Hunter Lovins' Natural Capitalism is that the amount of waste  
>>> matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is  
>>> close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to  
>>> nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the  
>>> fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well  
>>> as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices  
>>> also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is  
>>> used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that  
>>> goes into the consumption or production of a computer ends up  
>>> rather quickly as either an emission or as solid waste. In theory,  
>>> electronic products have technical service lives on the magnitude  
>>> of thirty years, but thanks to ever-shorter innovation cycles,  
>>> many devices are disposed of after a few years or months."
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jun 7, 2010, at 3:55 PM, palak joshi wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I am not sure if i am supposed to feel like this but I do anyway.   
>>> Maybe someone will have an explanaiton that will make me feel  
>>> better.
>>> I do understand evolution and how things get better with  
>>> time..after usage and with new technology. But i cant help but get  
>>> a little upset over the fact that the iphone that i had excitedly  
>>> bought a couple of years ago is now 'outdated'. It doesnt have any  
>>> of the things that 4 g (right) have!
>>> Am I supposed to stay committed to my existing phone (its  
>>> cracked!) or go for the better one? When does one 'settle down'  
>>> with a technology...does that happen when one dies or when one  
>>> doesnt have any money ...and to me both sound like extreme.
>>> What is the fine line between consumerism and getting excited with  
>>> new technology? I have had these qustions bother me many times...I  
>>> would love to talk about it if any body else feels the same  
>>> way..if not i will wait around for the next topic on social  :)
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Amy Muller <amymuller at gmail.com>  
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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