Electronic Waste Graveyard
Expiring software or server support created more than one-hundred million pounds of e-waste over past decade
Increasingly, we’re pushed to trash tech that should still work, such as Chromebooks, phones, and smart home devices, just because the software has expired or lost support. This database lists more than 100 tech products that have stopped working after manufacturers dropped support. It calculates the total weight of all these dead devices which have joined the 68 million tons of electronic waste disposed of each year.
When software expires, or web cloud services end, consumers and schools are pushed to replace devices that should still work. For example, our “Chromebook Churn” report found that tens of thousands of laptops were being replaced by schools because the software had expired. We also found Windows 10 will expire in October 2025, leaving up to 400 million PCs that won’t be able to upgrade to the next version.
We estimate a minimum of 130 million pounds of electronic waste has been created by expired software and canceled cloud services since 2014. We estimate that the expiration of Windows 10 will result in 1.6 billion pounds of electronic waste from PCs that can’t upgrade to Windows 11.
For the planet, this lack of support results in a death by a thousand server support cuts. This e-waste adds up. At the very least we need lifetime transparency for tech—we should know how long manufacturers guarantee the tech we buy will work before we buy it.
Thanks to Katie Shea, intern at the Secure Resilient Future Foundation, and Stephanie Markowitz for their contributions.
130,000,000 pounds of electronic wasteOur minimum estimate of the waste created by expired software and canceled cloud services since 2014.
Methodology
The Electronic Waste Graveyard is a non-exhaustive list of consumer tech products which have been rendered unusable due to lack of software support or server shut downs. We categorized products into several types. We categorize the reasons why products have stopped working into the following categories: Change in business model/financial reasons, Stopped offering cloud support (quick death), Halted software updates (slow death),
Losing web access, Servers down, Regulatory concerns,
Safety concerns. In order to estimate a minimum amount of electronic waste generated, we estimated the minimum number of global sales for each product and multiplied it by the weight of the product. Sales numbers are closely held propriety information, in order to estimate a lower-bound we used a variety of public sources and several modeling assumptions. We used the following sources of public information: product series-level sales data, market share data, manufacturer sales data by year, revenue from product, estimate from reliable source, sales revenue for manufacturer by year, number of companion app downloads, sales revenue for individual product and
online review numbers. We assumed that 80% of sales for a given year were for products released that year and that sales were evenly distributed between all models released that year by the manufacturer. We’re confident that these assumptions under-estimate the actual sales data for the products on this list, resulting in a minimum estimation of sales data and lower-bound on electronic waste generated.
Topics
Authors
Lucas Gutterman
Director, Designed to Last Campaign, U.S. PIRG Education Fund
Lucas leads PIRG’s Designed to Last campaign, fighting against obsolescence and e-waste and winning concrete policy changes that extend electronic consumer product lifespans and hold manufacturers accountable for forcing upgrades or disposal.
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