That seems more optimistic (or solar punk) than your summary e.g.:
> In terms of waste management, 85.3% of distributors reported
that they had a waste management strategy. Mostly, this
tended to involve collecting broken products, harvesting
them for spare parts and then storing the remainder in a
central warehouse before sending them to a (usually certified)
local e-waste recycling facility. How effective these recycling
facilities are, however, was beyond the scope of this report.
They seem to suggest that lithium batteries are the hardest to repair and recycle, but people want to do so. It feels like a problem that will get easier at scale.
For sure recycling is improving. That’s different from repair though.
The current cycle is
1. sell product
2. wait three years for it to break
3. Go back to 1.
The impact of the recycling can lessen the impact of that but it definitely doesn’t eliminate it. That’s just on environmental scale, think about the financial impact of carrying this debt for years on people earning $2 a day.
Also important to note that a lot of this is contingent of legislation that implements things like Extended Producer Responsibly (EPR) where you essentially have an additional tax on producers that gets used to fund collection. Kenya implemented this for the first time 12 months ago [1], so we will see the impact over the next couple years.
Re solar punk, my personal vision is that you basically teach people how to build and maintain these systems themselves by running solar tech bootcamp and giving them off-grid tools.
They then have tools and skills to fix anything without the need for the grid. Train 100k people and have them maintain these systems using a decentralised approach.
In fact, as part of our training we now have e-cooking stove suppliers who deliver training on their stoves to our students.
The economic impact of this cannot be over stated.
1. You are giving people the ability to 4x their income as repairers
2. You are saving the people who are getting new systems, instead of repairing them, multiples of their yearly income.
> In terms of waste management, 85.3% of distributors reported that they had a waste management strategy. Mostly, this tended to involve collecting broken products, harvesting them for spare parts and then storing the remainder in a central warehouse before sending them to a (usually certified) local e-waste recycling facility. How effective these recycling facilities are, however, was beyond the scope of this report.
They seem to suggest that lithium batteries are the hardest to repair and recycle, but people want to do so. It feels like a problem that will get easier at scale.