Circularity23 is the first corporate conference I’ve attended since leaving my job in sustainability, so I was prepared for some emotions. No more hallway work calls on my laptop; no multitasking email from remote colleagues; no hustling for customers over canapes. I wanted to attend in person this year because GreenBiz, the franchise that runs this event, has real pulling power. Its conferences and media channels provide opportunities to learn what companies are saying they are doing on sustainability, beyond Earth Day soundbites. 

Conferences are actually one of the only places to get a broader read on sustainability whether you are in or outside the corporate world. As I have learned, what happens in one part of a company, perhaps especially in environmental responsibility, may be at a distance from what happens in product groups. Conferences are also a place to build connections and camaraderie that outlast any one employer or client. Circularity’s attendance this year was over 1500, with a majority being newcomers. I found it a little ironic when this level of growth was repeatedly celebrated at a circularity conference. Like any other business, apparently, growth equals success.

The plenaries were a deluge of data covering the dire state of plastic pollution, fast fashion, ocean and human health. Of the breakouts, I only attended the electronics talks. What’s gnarly about electronics circularity is that these products combine so many components, each with their own provenance and supply chain. Plus, their technical complexity means they are designed, manufactured, tested and used in different regions all over the globe. This makes the carbon footprint of electronics somewhat terrifying. 

The “right to repair” electronics, a feature of this year’s conference, is a sustainability argument as much as a libertarian claim. Keeping already built devices in “circulation” as long as possible is the least one can do to compensate for the resource extraction involved in producing and delivering them. Advocacy group iFixit has been on this beat for two decades, targeting companies like Apple and John Deere, whose software locks and proprietary tools have been gross offenders in the crime of hardware hibernation. 

It’s hard to undo a century of industry marketing that has promoted novelty and disposability at point of purchase. Today’s product managers inherit both the problem of e-waste and the legacy of planned obsolescence as the primary business plan. Tech companies now find themselves torn in opposite directions, without a convincing narrative of change. On one side, the status quo: ship faster products so that users can experience the revolutionary power of new technology (looking at you, Metaverse AI). But lo! The climate crisis! We must also be responsible and sustainable! What is a GM to do?

For now, most circularity strategies involve a “goal” or “commitment” to make X% of products or components “recyclable” by 2030/40/50. Unfortunately, there is a difference between something being recyclable and having infrastructure nearby to recycle it. Recycling itself has a carbon cost, as Josh Lepawsky and Samantha MacBride explain in detail.

But even if recycling could end new resource extraction, the people describing circularity commitments at industry conferences are not on the hook for these goals. Execs who decide on sustainability strategy do so based on market research that creates consensus about which goals are realistic to set. This makes it nearly impossible for ordinary consumers to ask meaningful questions about the percentages and product lines selected for circularity promotion. 

In a panel on repair culture, Sarah Burkhart, Director of Software and Experiences at Dell, described her job as a program manager who “works through millions of trade-offs” to meet the expectations of stakeholders. (I am not meaning to single her out; this is a fair summary of PM work which is exhausting and HARD). In this scenario, the environment is just another stakeholder, with no priority vote in the list of parties vying for attention. This line of reasoning allows Dell to justify not doing more on sustainability because “customers aren’t demanding it.” 

In all three electronics sessions, audience members pushed back on industry representatives for placing the burden of sustainable design on consumers. Their responses included mild scolding (“You want thin and light laptops!”) and invocations of cost. To be sure, it is expensive and inconvenient to overhaul a supply chain that has been progressively offshored in the interests of efficiency. But thin and light laptops were designed for corporate clients as much as consumers, and these business customers are the most lucrative by volume. Most employees don’t get much choice over the computer they are given at work, because they are subject to bulk deals done by price sensitive IT managers.

There is a deep contradiction between the way hardware manufacturers grew their businesses and the sustainability challenges they are now being asked to address. For the moment, no one seems to have figured out how to make money on circularity in consumer electronics. Or at least no one working in US companies that sell through conventional retail. 

This is where Framework provides a welcome contrast to the sometimes unfounded statements of big company reps (eg. “people want to buy a laptop every three years”). Speaking in a session on product durability, founder Nirav Patel said the laptops his company builds aren’t theirs, but ours–the user is the only stakeholder. Building laptops that can be upgraded via modular parts, Framework is delivering what a subset of the market has wanted for years but mainstream manufacturers failed to provide. It is responding to user needs because it isn’t trying to cater to every user. There is a lesson here for other hardware companies navigating transition.

By calling the Framework laptop “yours,” Patel implies that assembling computing resources is a responsibility, a matter of stewardship – and this role must be earned. Modular devices enable users to choose components thoughtfully, only selecting essential requirements. This approach resonates for buyers with sustainability concerns, since upgrading hardware had come to involve a lot of inconvenience and waste, with constantly changing ports, connector cables, audio inputs and more.

Much like Google’s Nest and Pixel teams, who are also taking a user-centred approach to circular design, Framework can afford to think differently about hardware because it isn’t defending the legacy of a different moment in computing adoption. Older electronics brands are still struggling to narrow their focus from the Gates-era mandate: “a computer on every desk, in every home.” On the other hand, they are also failing to take credit when their products are already facilitating re-use. 

Free Geek, a nonprofit in Portland, takes donated electronics from individuals and organizations and refurbishes them for some of the 1 in 5 US households that do not have access to a computer. With established sanitization standards, many computers can be used for a second or third time by people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to them. Free Geek offers tech support and training classes as part of its mission, and is one of a network of microenterprises all over the US just like this. Free Geek was sitting right next to Dell on the panel when Burkhart was claiming there is no consumer demand for sustainable electronics. More circularity discussions need to start realising these mutually beneficial connections between different, equally important, economies of supply and demand. 

The problem Free Geek now faces is that as electronics have become more affordable – especially at the low end of the market – it is increasingly hard to rationalise the human labor involved in repair. Technicians who work in refurbishing nonprofits in the heart of America’s tech hubs are fighting for a livable wage. Meanwhile cheap Chromebooks acquired during COVID lie dormant in classrooms due to expired software support. Policy, tax incentives, and a lot more open source software could help this state of affairs.

Circularity23 taught me that electronics manufacturers need better definitions of waste as much as they need more nuanced understanding of users. As Adam Minter shows in studies of the global second-hand trade, there’s a wide gulf between countries where the middle class is growing, and one like the United States “where incomes have stagnated and infrastructure spending peaked decades ago.” One audience comment on the last day of the conference asked whether something might be learned from resale and waste picking economies in China and India, among other countries. The question was dismissed by Best Buy’s Tim Dunn, who claimed he only worked for a North American company. Given the origin of most of the products Best Buy sells, however, this response misses an opening for a deeper conversation. The supply chain for electronics in North America begins and ends elsewhere: that is a reality of the business. The desks and (home) offices where we use, and too often hoard, hardware products are a temporary landing zone. It is all of our responsibility to ensure these precious materials have other lives.

Tech companies find it hard to fix e-waste because it isn’t a technical problem to solve. It is a reflection of the kind of society we have decided to invest in. It exists as a byproduct of a business model that attached human values and emotions to the experience of device ownership. If this logistical feat took decades to build, by the same logic, it is within the scope of a new generation to reimagine.