Are our electronics threatening the planet? — Ahmad Ibrahim
JULY 3 — We now live in an age of electronics abundance—but it’s an abundance with a disconcerting hangover. The world generates over 50 million tons of e-waste every year. That’s equivalent to throwing away 1,000 laptops every second. Most of it ends up in landfills or is illegally shipped to developing countries, where it poisons the soil and the people who scavenge it. Enter the idea of the circular economy (CE). It sounds like corporate jargon, but it’s actually a radical, beautiful idea: what if nothing was ever “waste” in the first place?
A new, rigorous study—a systematic literature review by Singh, Aggarwal, and Garg—has sifted through years of research to answer a pressing question: Why isn’t the electronics sector already circular, and what will actually make it work? Most people think the solution is better recycling. But Singh and his team discovered something surprising: recycling is the last resort. The real blocks happen much earlier.
Roadblock #1: The “Right to Repair”. Your phone dies. The battery is fine, the screen is fine, but the company says you need a whole new device. Or, a $2 component fails, but the product is glued shut. The researchers call this “planned obsolescence,” and it’s the enemy of circularity. Companies profit when you buy new, not when you fix old. Until laws force makers to provide spare parts and repair manuals, the circular economy is dead on arrival.
Roadblock #2: Toxic Design. Even when we try to recycle e-waste, we fail. Why? Because electronics are designed like toxic cocktails. We mix rare earth metals with flame retardants, solder chips permanently to boards, and hide valuable gold inside layers of poisonous plastic. The researchers found that most e-waste recycling is actually downcycling—you don’t get a new laptop from an old one; you get a low-grade plastic flowerpot. We lose all the high value. So what does a circular electronics future look like? Singh, Aggarwal, and Garg point to three levers that businesses and governments must pull—immediately.
First, Product-as-a-Service (PaaS): Stop selling lightbulbs. Sell light. Stop selling phones. Sell connectivity. When a company like Philips keeps ownership of its medical scanners or a startup leases laptops to offices, the company suddenly has every incentive to make that product repairable, durable, and upgradeable. Because it’s still their asset. The researchers call this “aligning incentives”—the single most powerful tool in the box.
Second, Modular Design: Imagine a phone where the battery pops out, the camera clicks off, and the screen slides apart. No glue. No special tools. That is “modularity.” Fairphone is the poster child here. The research is clear: modular electronics are 70 per cent easier to repair and yield far higher quality recycled materials. It’s not rocket science; it’s just a choice companies refuse to make.
Third, Take-back 2.0: Old take-back programs (mail us your dead printer) fail because consumers are lazy and shipping costs money. The new model? Reverse vending machines in every supermarket that give you a coffee coupon for your old charger. Or deposit schemes—pay $10 extra for your router, get it back when you return it. The researchers found that convenience + incentive is the only formula that works.
The study is brilliant because it lays out a roadmap for the next decade of research: The consumer black box. We know people say they want green electronics. But we don’t really know what makes them actually return a broken device versus tossing it in the trash. Behavioural science needs to step up. Blockchain for tracking. Could we use digital passports for every circuit board? A QR code that tells a recycler exactly what metal are inside? The tech exists; the research on scaling it does not. If we make electronics cheaper via reuse, will people just buy more of them? A circular iPhone that lasts 10 years is great—unless you also buy a tablet, a smartwatch, and 12 sensors for your home. We need research on total system consumption, not just product lifespans.
The authors deliver a sobering but hopeful message. The electronics sector is not doomed. But wishing for recycling won’t save us. The circular economy is not an environmental problem; it is a design and business model problem. The solution is not to become better trash sorters. It is to stop making trash in the first place. So, the next time your phone battery dies, ask yourself: Who should fix this? If the answer is “nobody—just buy a new one,” you’ve just identified the enemy. And now, thanks to this research, you also know exactly which levers to push to defeat it.
* Professor Datuk Dr Ahmad Ibrahim is affiliated with the Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy Studies at UCSI University and is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. He can be reached at [email protected].
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
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