Can Consumer Tech Ever Really 
Be Sustainable?

In 2020, the United Nations published a report on electronic waste – and the findings were bracing. The world was producing a record 53.6 million metric tonnes of e-waste per year, the equivalent of over a million Boeing 737s. Comprising everything from video cameras and televisions to vacuum cleaners and dishwashers, this contained $57 billion of raw materials, more than the GDP of many countries – of which only 17.4 percent was recycled. More troubling still, the UN forecast that on current trends, annual e-waste generation will grow to 74.7 million metric tonnes by 2030. 

This is not only a public health concern, because e-waste contains harmful substances, but it’s a stark environmental issue – and that’s before you even consider the lifetime energy use of all those devices. The UN forecasts that this year, the world’s population will hit eight billion people; 20 years prior, it had just passed six billion. For a measure of how that translates into tech proliferation, consider mobile phones. Last year, there were 14.91 billion phones operating globally; this year that number is expected to be around a billion more. These devices don’t just use electricity when they are in the hands of the consumer; their manufacture and distribution also generate considerable emissions.

This picture presents myriad challenges. On the one hand, there’s the need to reduce the carbon footprint. That’s an imperative for many industries. On the other, are problems which are specific to consumer tech brands. It is inherently difficult for them to operate sustainably thanks to the very nature of their business. These products are resource-intensive – plastics, chemicals, rare-earth elements, all of which are tricky to separate from each other and therefore hard to recycle. A circuit board, for instance, is a tightly-packed maze of overlapping parts and materials. Combine that with the often short life-cycles of electronic products, owing to the difficulty of repair and the onward march of technological progress, and you have an acute problem.

As environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) has become an increasing priority for the consumer, the need to rise to this challenge has become ever more pressing – and that’s only going to intensify. The younger generations who will become the customers of tomorrow will place even greater emphasis on sustainability than their parents. But there’s also a practical reason why the problem needs to be addressed. Finite resources will dwindle and become more expensive, and shifting political tectonics – for instance, deteriorating relations between China and the West – will create further barriers to accessing them. For consumer tech brands, having a long-term business will be about embedding sustainability across manufacturing and product life-cycles. Those that fail to do that may also have trouble attracting talent. In other words, it’s emphatically not just a “nice to have”.

Recycling might seem to be the silver bullet. Indeed, consumer tech brands are trying to tackle recycling challenges and use ever more “closed-loop” materials. Take Apple, which has created various robots to aid recycling efforts: one model is called Daisy, which can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour; there’s also Dave which recovers rare-earth magnets, tungsten and steel; and Taz, which reclaims magnets from audio modules. In the future, it seems likely that brands will develop products in ways that make it easier to recycle their parts. But recycling can’t be the whole story – solving this problem will need a multifaceted solution.

Right now, there’s more work underway across the consumer tech sector than ever before. WIRED convened a roundtable with five of the industry’s leading brands, in partnership with the digital transformation consultancy Publicis Sapient, to consider the most innovative ideas in this space and ask: what will it take to make consumer tech more sustainable?

Raj Shah, managing partner at Publicis Sapient, says we should consider how the food industry approaches this issue. “Until you get a ‘calorie label’ that states the water consumption, the energy consumption, the recycled content, consumers aren’t going to really get a clear picture,” he says. “I think that there needs to be either somebody who says, ‘We're gonna do this first’ or a consortium has to come out that says, ‘We are the labelling experts here’.” Arguably, governments may need to step in to ensure industry-wide participation.

It might seem that the current opacity serves the tech world. However, Deji Olukotun, director of policy and corporate social responsibility at Sonos, says that it makes for a poor relationship with the consumer. “We definitely hear from our focus group studies that when consumers want the new shiny object or the new experience, but they don't know what the consequences are, it makes them uncomfortable.” In any case, in Shah’s view it is inevitable that these companies will have to compete on sustainability as the next generation becomes buyers – it would make good business sense for them to get in front of that shift and ensure they would be proud to talk plainly about the environmental impact of their products.

Once resale value drops to the point that a product is no longer worth reselling, that device could then be recycled for parts – or play a role in an upcycling project. Take Smartphones4Good. "Hoarding a used smartphone in the drawer?” asks it website. “You can now save our planet’s valuable resources, and give your phone a new life by sending it to us. We wipe all the remaining data off the phone, after which a female entrepreneur in Africa will be given a chance to lease it at an affordable price.”

The less conventional approach is repurposing the device entirely. Samsung has been especially active in this space. Take its “Upcycling At Home” initiative, which repurposes old Galaxy smartphones as Internet of Things devices such as baby monitors, or its Wildlife Watch scheme, which supports the all-female Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit in the Kruger National Park. “They're trying to patrol this vast nature reserve, which is impossible, and there are only a handful of them,” says Benjamin Braun, Chief Marketing Officer of Samsung Europe. “So we contacted them and said, we have an idea: we give our old Samsung mobile phones to you, we put solar panels on them, we put them out in your game reserve and we live stream all of this to the world. If anyone sees poaching activity, they hit the button, you get alerted, and you can go and deal with it.”

To Braun, solving a consumer problem at the same time as solving an environmental problem is the winning formula. He references a recent Samsung project: redesigning TV remotes to include solar panels, obviating the frustration of discovering the battery is flat. The environmental pay-off? “Over seven years, we are stopping 99 million batteries from ending up in landfills.” This year at CES, Samsung unveiled the next iteration, which harvests energy from Wi-Fi signals and does away with conventional batteries. “It’s pretty funky,” says Braun. Batteries are a major battlefront in this space, because they are such a barrier to operating sustainably. Lithium mines are associated with environmental hazards and human rights abuses, while recycling batteries is challenging and potentially dangerous. Green battery innovation – moving to alternative materials, making them reusable – is a major strand of research. So too is finding alternative materials for the casing of electronic devices: using bioplastics, say, or finding ways to recover plastic from the ocean and render it fit for purpose. This is a concept Samsung is also exploring through upcycling discarded fishing nets for use in its products. The company estimates that the initiative could prevent more than 50 tons of such waste from entering the world’s oceans by the end of 2022.

Shah argues that it is essential to put this kind of thinking at the core of the business, and not allow it to be a mere adjunct. “This is about working with product teams to define products with a sustainability angle, just like you would ask what the user interface looks like or how it fits into the ecosystem of your products,” he says. “Companies need to be saying: we are pushing our product development teams, pushing our innovation, and will present sustainability as a differentiator for why you should buy our device over the competitor’s.”

Another key strategy is offsets. Shah suggests that this could be turned into a revenue stream. Say you buy a laptop; the manufacturer could offer you the opportunity to offset certain aspects of its manufacture – the water footprint, or the carbon involved in its delivery. The company could charge a modest fee for this. “I'm not saying that these companies should make a huge premium on it, but they can offer it as an ancillary service with a thin margin and still do good while making money.”

Renewable energy and offsetting schemes come under close scrutiny from environmentalists. Building power generators such as wind turbines or solar farms, and contributing that power to the grid, is usually deemed to be the most desirable option. Companies that trade in renewable energy certificates or engage in offsetting may find themselves accused of greenwashing, depending on the nature of the scheme. For example: some schemes pay farmers to conserve trees that would supposedly otherwise not be there – but it’s hard to prove a counterfactual. As Dell’s Louise Koch acknowledges, it's a tricky space. Done right it has a place, and can function as a transition mechanism; but ultimately offsetting is always a next-best solution. “What needs to happen first is to reduce, reduce, reduce – companies need to reduce carbon emissions, consumers need to transition to renewable energy in the house,” says Koch. “If, in addition to that, you offer customers the service of a carbon offset or carbon neutral certification, you want to make sure you are working with best-in-class schemes.”

That comes with a corollary: if things aren’t going well, you can’t hide it. Transparency is everything. “We actually just have to say what we're doing, and be honest about it,” says Olukotun. “One of the hardest parts about targets is: when you miss one, what do you do? You want to always report good news. In an internally-facing business context, not doing this is pretty common – if you miss your sales targets, you have to face up to it. But it's different when you have to talk about it publicly. So learning to be comfortable with that is key.”

As to the fundamental question of whether consumer tech can become truly sustainable – does the resource-intensive nature of the enterprise not mean that the two things are essentially incompatible? “I don't think companies have to be 100 percent renewable and I don't think it has to be the same for every company,” says Shah. The question then becomes: what meaningfully counts as “sustainable”? “We're going to let the market decide what they expect of us,” he says. That market includes investors, supply chain partners and, of course, consumers. He forecasts that by 2030, consumers may expect around 40 percent of a product’s content to be either recycled or offset – if only because this may translate into cheaper prices. Non-recycled materials, in his view, may one day become prohibitively expensive.

That’s why ultimately, Shah says, ESG and revenue will go hand-in-hand. “My prediction for 2030 is that a major CEO like Mr. Bezos or Mr. Dell will come on an analyst call and say, ‘Our earnings were driven by the sustainable innovations that we have created,’” he says. “It will be proof that sustainability is not just good for the purpose of the company, it's good for the bottom line of the company. And I think that's coming soon.”