Growing up with the challenges of dyslexia, Nolan McGuirk found a friend in a simple, early Kindle. The beloved device was just enough of a gadget to break the intimidation factor of reading, yet still respectful of the printed word.
Then Amazon stopped supporting his “old” model.
Also lost and mourned in McGuirk’s personal electronics graveyard is a favorite computer running on Windows 10, a perfectly capable operating system that Microsoft stopped supporting when it launched Windows 11.
“And it’s just kind of sitting in a drawer now, which is unfortunate,” said McGuirk, part of a satire-with-a-point “graveside service” for outdated electronics Wednesday at Governors Park in Denver.
“I 100% think making the life of these devices longer is really important, and not shutting off the services,” McGuirk said. “If you’re just doing it to sell more products or sell the newer product, I feel like that’s a waste of the money consumers spend.”
The nonprofit consumer watchdog CoPIRG organized the funeral, complete with gravestones for old Kindles and Spotify Car Thing and older Google Nest thermostats, to highlight what it says is tremendous resource waste and landfills overflowing with outdated electronic devices.
“We now estimate 1.7 billion pounds of electronic waste has been created by expired software and canceled cloud services since 2014” nationwide, according to a new report from the CoPIRG Foundation. “The largest contributor by far was the expiration of Windows 10, resulting in up to 1.6 billion pounds of electronic waste from PCs that can’t upgrade to Windows 11.”
CoPIRG and its allies had previously reported that tens of thousands of stripped-down Chromebooks distributed to students at public schools became obsolete paper weights when the Google-designed software expired.
“When software expires, or web cloud services end, consumers and schools are pushed to replace devices that should still work,” CoPIRG says.
CoPIRG and its allies want manufacturers to negotiate with consumer groups to keep updating software and maintain internet connections and support for older electronics models. Failing that, they will begin pressing Colorado legislators to add “right to update” laws to bills they’ve already passed for “right to repair” other complex items like wheelchairs and farm implements.
At the very least, said CoPIRG director Danny Katz, companies should disclose when they sell a product how many years they are committing to support it.
“To get the most life from a device, the best way is to use it longer, not to recycle it,” Katz said. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of electronics in Colorado have been relegated to a back shelf or drawer, he said.
Liana Ruedel also was a longtime Kindle fan, until May, when CoPIRG says Amazon cut off 13 models of Kindle from buying in the online Amazon store or connecting to local public libraries.
“No new books,” Ruedel read, mock-somberly, from her written eulogy. “The company said that it had to do this because the technology has come a long way. Meanwhile, I thought reading text on a screen was pretty much the same as it has been. Silly me. One way I’d really love for technology to come a long way is how sustainable it is. It might not erase the pain of losing our beloved Kindles, but it’s what they would have wanted.”