By design, planned obsolescence influences electronic waste in a big way, because it ensures devices will die sooner than they potentially could, since they are built with short lifetimes in mind. Below, you will find a small collection of scholars who have already begun to draw connections between the increase in electronic waste and planned obsolescence.
Jennifer Gabrys, chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, makes excellent claims connecting planned obsolescence to e-waste in her book, Digital Rubbish: A natural history of electronics.
Gabrys explains how planned obsolescence in digital devices wreaks havoc on the environment. "Electronics consist of a broad range of devices now designed with increasingly shorter life spans, which means that every upgrade will produce its corresponding electronic debris" (2). This is particularly problematic in the sense that it has become a habit within consumer culture to ditch previous models of certain devices in order to make room for the newest models as soon as they hit the sales floor.
Encouragement toward consumerism at all costs has helped to create the situation that society faces today. Technology developers are quick to advertise their new gadgets, but don't necessarily request in their ads that consumers recycle their old devices in sustainable ways. Sometimes, certain businesses will create incentives for consumers to recycle their used devices, but don't typically mention anything about recycling programs unless an incentive is offered. This is socially and environmentally irresponsible, as many consumers are not fully aware of the negative impacts that poor e-waste disposal has on the natural world, and in-turn, those negative impacts can contaminate vital resources necessary for plant, animal, and human survival.
Syed Faraz Ahmed details how planned obsolescence influences negative environmental impacts in the article, "The Global Cost of Electronic Waste" featured in The Atlantic.
"The increase in consumption of electronics has two major adverse ecological effects. First, it significantly increases mining and procurement for the materials needed for production of gadgets. And second, discarded devices produce large quantities of electronic waste. That waste could be reduced through reuse, repair, or resale. Whether it ever will be is an open question."
Simply said, the environment suffers over built-in obsolescence because the materials required to create the devices are not readily available, and the devices that are no longer useful occupy valuable space on the planet while also tainting the Earth's natural nourishment.
People tend to think of technology in a very intangible way, because virtual reality is just that: virtual, and therefore, intangible. One cannot physically reach their hand into a computer screen and pick an apple out of a picture of an apple tree displayed on the screen (yet). For this reason, people tend to overlook the fact that the physical hardware encasing digital devices is tangible, and does cause the distribution of toxic waste throughout the globe. The physical hardware required for digital devices is commonly disregarded once the device's useful life is finished. This is problematic because once our devices eventually die for good, their body parts do not decay like natural organisms' do.
Ultimately, planned obsolescence leads to high concentrations of e-waste in the form of increased technological product development at an unnecessary rate. Consumerism has helped to influence this shift toward a throw-away culture that encourages consumers to purchase new electronics before theirs are completely useless. The environment suffers in the name of digital consumerism because it increases the demand for the precious materials encased within the devices, and because the gadgets are ultimately disposed of once their useful life is complete. Since society tends to perceive the digital world as vastly intangible, the environmental impact that devices cause once their useful life is finished goes largely overlooked.
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