Re: Green lobby failure
Please note: repairability is not necessarily the same as recyclability, and these days often isn't.
Plastic and metal parts can be shredded together before separation. The harmful and or costly stuff is in the screen and motherboard.
Glued parts can be more economically separated for recycling than screwed parts, because unscrewing is labour intensive and ungluing just requires an oven.
Gluing is also used to reduce thickness, and to make things more reliable (stresses are spread across a part rather than focused on stress-rising bosses). It's likely that the flexible nature of glue is factored into to the shock resistance of the end product.
If Greenpeace* are trying to do a total environmental cost analysis, then they need to factor in how reliable a product is, how long it remain useful for, and how long a user will want to own it (i.e how pleasant it is to use and own). Repairability is only a factor after it has been multiplied by the fraction of people who would actually repair it, multiplied by the chance of it actually going wrong, multiplied by this failure not occuring within the warranty period. So, that's a small number, multiplied by a fraction multiplied by a fraction multiplied by a fraction.
*remember this is the group who protested against a GM crop trial in Australia by setting fire to it, thus dispersing the GM material over a wide area. Still, being an activist impresses some young women, so what the hell.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
