One of the most important school supplies for public school students has sustainability issues.Report from non-profit consumer advocacy group Pirgu (opens in new tab) says the planned obsolescence of Google Chromebooks provided by public schools will be costly for taxpayers and the environment.
PIRG claims that the biggest cause of “Chromebook churn” is that these devices provided to students last an average of about four years. As of March 2021, 48.1 million of her K-12 students have been provided with Chromebooks, making remote learning more common due to the pandemic. This means students will use multiple Chromebooks while in school.
Churn is related to several factors. The first and most common is that Chromebook OS essentially has an expiration date after which it can no longer receive updates, forcing school systems to upgrade to newer versions of devices. Many public school systems require fully up-to-date hardware to access online testing services.
Another factor is that Chromebooks are notoriously difficult to repair, spare parts are hard to come by, and are often incompatible between different models. Throwing away a broken Chromebook is less hassle than fixing it, forcing the school to buy a new device. And since only about a third of all Chromebooks are recyclable, most of them end up in e-waste.
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PIRG proposes some short-term solutions. The first is extending the lifespan of Chrome OS software to 10 years from the product launch date. In many cases, perfectly fine Chromebooks end up in the trash because Google no longer supports them.
“All ChromeOS devices will receive regular updates from Google until the Auto Update Expiration (AUE) date is reached,” according to Google. Update policy page (opens in new tab)This page provides some counter-examples to PIRG’s OS longevity concerns. Enterprise-oriented systems tend to be updated more frequently, so a 10-year request doesn’t sound unreasonable.
A second, more complicated solution is for Google to pressure Chromebook makers to increase production of compatible spare parts across multiple models and improve repairability by extending the life of their products. According to the report, doubling the lifespan of Chromebooks sold in 2020 would reduce carbon pollution and put 909,000 cars on the road.
Planned obsolescence is common on phones.apple is sued many times (opens in new tab) In Europe, over the planned obsolescence of the iPhone 6.
Public schools won’t stop offering Chromebooks to students anytime soon.Still, this technology’s high failure rate is costing some school districts millions of dollars (opens in new tab) Replace those dying devices.
The idea of a 100% sustainable laptop is not far off. Last year, Dell showed off a prototype of his 13-inch modular laptop made entirely of recyclable and reusable parts. (opens in new tab) We hope this will help reduce the overall amount of e-waste from laptops and inspire laptop manufacturers to adopt similar programs.Framework highly customizable and upgradable laptop (opens in new tab) We present another possible future with less waste.
