We have seen before my bias towards using solid, well designed tools for many years, repairing them instead of replacing:
These machines appeal to me because they’re such a terrific example of sustainability. Apple may release new laptops and revisions every year but you don’t have to buy them that often. In fact you can go five years, even ten depending on what you use your computer for. The relatively high price you pay up-front translates to many years of trouble-free use. The ‘cost per wear‘ equivalent of Apple’s laptops is extremely low.
May 2020 saw an incident that is the polar opposite of this ethos, which is why it caught my attention.
The summary is this: In 2018 Uber bought the electric bike sharing company Jump. In 2020, Uber made an investment in another shared electric scooter company named Lime. As part of this deal, the ownership of Jump’s assets was transferred to Lime. In other words, Lime took Jump off Uber’s hands. Except that “there were also “tens of thousands” of older-model bikes that Lime did not inherit as part of the deal”.
These electric bikes were all destroyed.
Specifically, the company that has the contract
is removing and keeping the electronic and battery components. After that… the bikes and scooters will “be shredded through the auto shredder, and the metal will be distributed out from there.”
The statement from Uber simply says
“We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes, but given many significant issues—including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment—we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them.”
This is a travesty. These bikes could have been donated to communities in the US or even to lower-income countries, de-branded and with the battery pack and tracking elements removed. A bike-sharing enthusiast website describes how this could be done for the specific Jump bike model being scrapped. It is hard to imagine that Uber could not have found a single local government body in the US that was not willing to work with liability issues.
The same bike sharing enthusiast site described a worse problem with a new Jump model that is now with Lime:
the JUMP engineers who designed the 5.8 were never able to get the system to work just right… The new 5.8 has chipsets with firmware built into almost everything. Even the taillight has to talk to the other boards, or it will not unlock or power up. It is arguably the most technologically progressive dockless bicycle ever built, and all of the code and engineering behind this firmware was executed entirely in-house by JUMP techs… And UBER fired every last JUMP engineer that designed the system.
For a combination of corporate fecklessness in the name of risk avoidance, this episode is going to be hard to top.
3 replies on “The opposite of sustainability”
I agree that the bikes could’ve been better utilized by less-privileged communities. Probably Uber did this to avoid the risk of IP theft and potential lawsuits etc. Shareholder concerns still beat stakeholder concerns. Lime may also have been complicit in this, who knows ?
In my view, Apple may not really be a champion of sustainability. That their Macs last long may not be a result of their concern for sustainability. One can indeed “recycle” an old Apple product at an Apple Store in return for some money. Apple probably cannibalizes the machine in part to build new ones; so a solidly compatible and stable firmware is needed for that. That it results in a long lasting machine for customers too, is a good by-product for the customers.
They no longer do this for their now obsolete iPods and very old Macs. They expect them to be dumped.
I’ve been using the FreeBSD OS on a Dell Inspiron since 2018. I’m certain it will last me a decade and a half with activities like software development, a web service, handling documents, general web surfing etc. quite smoothly.
(1) It’s very probable it’s because of IP theft and such. The bike enthusiast website I linked to described how the bikes could have been stripped of proprietary components. Ultimately Uber – or Lime – decided it was not worth the potential benefit to communities.
(2) I’m not an expert on Apple’s approach to sustainability in the way you described it. I recall a while ago they showcased robots that could disassemble used phones rapidly. What I mean by sustainability is that *My* use of tech is more sustainable because I don’t replace devices for years. Unfortunately the 2012 MacBook Pro I use is one of the last that was this expandable.
(3) Which brings me to this profile you might be interested in, given what you described about your setup: https://usesthis.com/interviews/mark.pilgrim/ ← see the section “What would be your dream setup?”
Hi again. What’s the use of adding so much gadgetry to a simple cycle anyway ? A light and an attached phone (for maps) should be sufficient. Other things are to dumb down your mind, like collision avoidance devices in conjunction with (say) a movie device which records your facial expressions as you see embedded advertisements.
That link you gave is a good one. Open source is indeed better suited for computing disruptions and longevity.