Posted on: Tuesday, February 8, 2005

Designing electronics for an afterlife

By Alex Pham
Los Angeles Times

Before the Panasonic SD Video Camera was born, designers planned for its death.

When the $400 camera wears out, Panasonic engineers want it to do one final thing: be easy to get rid of.

So it has no lead, no mercury and no brominated flame retardants — all hazardous substances that make consumer electronics such as personal computers, digital cameras and televisions dangerous to bury in landfills and difficult to recycle. The camera's aluminum casing can be smelted and made into other products. When its lithium ion battery runs out, it can be dropped off at one of 30,000 retail stores nationwide.

"We wanted to eliminate hazardous materials and make it easy to recycle," said David Thompson, director of corporate environmental affairs for Matsushita Electrical Industrial Corp., which owns Panasonic. "This is a design objective that's being built into all of our products."

And not just at Panasonic. Computer and electronics makers around the world increasingly factor a product's destruction into its creation. The trend is driven in part by environmental regulations but also by shorter product cycles and a consumer culture that allow obsolete gadgetry to stack up faster than ever.

"Prices for electronics have come way down," said Philip White, principal designer at Orb Analysis in San Francisco and professor of product design at San Jose State University. "Instead of fixing something, it's become cheaper to throw it away and get a new one."

Americans annually toss out more than 100 million cell phones, according to Collective Good International, a group that collects and re-sells used cell phones. Each day, 10,000 TVs and PC monitors go dark, according to the National Safety Council. And an estimated three-quarters of all home PCs, working or not, are stuffed in closets, attics and basements — in large part because getting rid of them can be such a hassle.

"I've got an old cell phone, and I have no idea what to do with it," said Bruce Goodman, an attorney in Beverly Hills, Calif.

European countries are much stricter than the United States when it comes to regulations on recycyling electronic equipment. At the heart of the regulations is an economic notion stating that the best way to deal with pollution is to build its cost into the product. If companies must pay to dispose of their own products, they would have an incentive to design their products to be easier to recycle or more environmentally friendly and, thus, less costly to clean up.

"If companies know they're going to see these things again, will they design them differently? You bet they will," said Bruce Sterling, a lecturer at Pasadena's influential Art Center College of Design, which next year will include "sustainable design" classes in its curriculum.

Manufacturers expect tighter regulations to become the norm in some of their biggest markets. So they're redesigning to make recycling easier.

Manolo Cassasola appreciates the effort. Cassasola dismantles electronic devices at Silicon Salvage, a recycling company in Anaheim, Calif.

Equipped with pliers, wire cutters and screwdrivers, Cassasola rips apart personal computers. He gets as much as $1 a pound for circuit boards, thanks to the tiny amounts of gold, silver, palladium and copper in them. Copper wires sell for about 35 cents a pound. The metal case will fetch 50 cents a pound. And the CD-ROM and disk drive are wiped clean of data and sent to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, where they are built into low-cost computers.

These days, products are dying even faster than they used to. Traditional cathode-ray tube, or CRT, television sets can be counted on for at least seven years, with some lasting more than 20 years. But newer plasma TV sets begin to wear out in just three to four years, said Rob Enderle, a technology consultant. With DVD players, a precipitous drop in price has also translated into a decline in quality.