Americans buy new cell phones every 18 months, Europeans buy them every 15 months, and the Japanese every 9 months. Global replacement rates for digital cameras range between two and three years. And U.S. businesses replace their PCs every four years.
Where do most of these used products go? Directly into the trash. Indeed, in the United States alone, consumers throw away 400 million electronic products each year.
What happens to the discarded electronics, which represent one million tons of electronic waste (e-waste) annually? Many are shipped to developing countries and illegally processed to recover precious metals, using processes that dangerously pollute the air and water with lead, dioxins, and other toxins.
Recent work by Erica Plambeck, Professor of Operations, Information, and Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Qiong Wang of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories, points to a solution - one that slows down the rate of new product introductions. This, in turn, reduces the speed with which consumers replace the electronics they’ve purchased, and decreases the mountains of e-waste accumulating around the planet.
Cuitlahuac
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