The Ethics of Disposable Earbuds

 

Over the Christmas holidays, we stayed at a nice Texas motel that had an exercise room.  I usually take a daily bike ride for exercise, but as I didn't bring my bicycle with me, I did the next best thing and used a stationary bike.  The bike had a video screen connected to the cable-TV system of the motel, and for the convenience of exercisers, the motel provided free disposable earbuds, so if you wanted to watch Metallica music videos, you wouldn't disturb the lady next to you who was tuned to PBS.

 

The earbuds worked fine, but I had never come across an establishment which provided them free of charge.  It got me to thinking about how a thing which was once a high-tech piece of specialized and uncommon equipment has become a commodity so inexpensive that motels can afford to give them away.

 

The first device that transformed electrical impulses into audible speech was Bell's telephone receiver.  You have probably seen old movies in which characters use the "candlestick" phone, consisting of a vertical stand with a transmitter that the user spoke into, and a "potato-masher" receiver that was held to the ear.  The reason the potato-masher was as long as it was—several inches—wasn't for convenience in handling.  All electromagnetic transducers (the technical term for a device that converts electric waves into sound waves) need a magnetic field, and producing a strong enough magnetic field to make the device work efficiently has always been one of the defining challenges of making receivers, headphones, and earphones.

 

In the 1890s, the best magnetic materials were lousy by today's standards.  It took a U-shaped piece of iron about three or four inches long to make a strong enough magnetic field to work well as a telephone receiver, and so that was why the potato-masher was as long as it was. 

 

By the early 1900s, materials had improved to the extent that the magnet was small enough to fit into a round can, and thus the headphone came to be developed.  By 1930, you could buy a good pair of radio-quality headphones, the kind that fit over your head with a spring strap, for $1.09.  I have an Allied Radio catalog published in Chicago which describes them as "[u]nusually sensitive headphones carefully designed with aluminum shells and genuine moulded caps."  It's not clear why an imitation moulded cap would be a problem, but a certain amount of vivid writing was expected by the catalog reader of the day.

 

In 2024 dollars, those phones would cost $19.43, so how does a motel get by with giving their modern-day equivalent away?  Advances in manufacturing, of course, and the most significant advance has been in the technology of magnetic materials.

 

Around 1990, it became possible to make what are called neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets, which produce the same magnetic field intensity as previous types but with a small fraction of the weight and size.  Magnets made of NdFeB are why we can have excellent sound quality in tiny packages, and also why we can have small battery-powered drones (one of the reasons, anyway—lithium batteries are the other).  And China, which bought the NdFeB technology from General Motors in the 1990s and ran with it, according to the economics website MacroPolo, makes the vast majority of all NdFeB magnetic materials today, although Japan and Germany still have toeholds in the high-end parts of the market.  The U. S. is no longer a significant player in the technology, although we are one of the largest consumers.

 

The reason why the motel didn't provide a single public set of earbuds, the way nineteenth-century railroads used to provide a single public brush and comb chained to the washroom wall, is sanitation.  I haven't seen any actual statistics on diseases known to be transmitted by reusing somebody else's earbuds, but I suppose it could happen.  And there's the yuck factor of just thinking that somebody else's earwax is getting into your ear.  Even if the motel provided more expensive non-ear-penetrating headphones with padding, there would still be skin-to-pad contact around the ear area, and so the easiest out is just to supply cheap disposable earbuds.

 

So what is the harm, if any, in using some inexpensive earbuds once and throwing them away?  

 

For one thing, that decision adds to the stream of waste electronics flooding our landfills daily.  As pollutants go, a pair of earbuds isn't that big a deal, but they are yet another example of the disposable society that is one of the driving themes of modernity.  Magnets aren't exactly biodegradable, but it turns out that one of the more significant growth industries in the U. S. is the enterprise of picking through garbage to find NdFeB magnet material to recycle.  An economic report by MacroPolo tells me that in the next few years, there may be a crunch in the NdFeB magnet supply chain.  China can't make the best ones, Japan and Germany are maxed out, and the demand for magnets to go in everything from electric cars and wind turbines to drones and earbuds is increasing rapidly.  So magnet material may become recycling gold if new sources of supply aren't found soon.

 

The libertarian economists among us would say, "Hey, if earbuds are cheap enough to throw away, don't worry about it.  If it gets to be a problem, the price will go up and we'll do something else, maybe rent them and sterilize them."  And they would have a point.  But just because something is cheap doesn't mean that it's fine to throw it away after one or a few uses.  Turns out that I kept my earbuds after we left the hotel, and now I have my own private set in my shaving kit if I ever come across another motel which isn't as generous with earbuds.  And if the coming NdFeB magnet crunch comes to pass, I may be glad I kept mine.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report "The Impermanence of Permanent Magnets:  A Case Study on Industry, Chinese Production, and Supply Constraints" at https://macropolo.org/analysis/permanent-magnets-case-study-industry-chinese-production-supply/, and an original Allied Radio catalog for 1930 in my collection of antique catalogs. 

Caught in the HP Printer Cartridge Wars

 

A few months ago, the old computer printer I was using expired, and as I'm working mainly from home these days and need to use the printer several times a day, I spent a half hour or so researching printers and ended up buying an HP 8035 unit.  It's a middle-of-the-line combination inkjet printer/scanner, and as long as the original printer cartridges lasted it worked fine.  And even once the red (I guess the technical name is magenta) cartridge gave out and I swapped a new one in, it was fine.  Then the yellow cartridge gave out, and I decided to swap out both the yellow and the cyan cartridge.

When I turned the unit back on, it gave me an error message that said in effect "These cartridges are not intended for use in this printer."  Now on some level, I was aware of the ongoing battle that printer manufacturers wage with those pesky cartridge remanufacturers and refillers who recycle used cartridges, refill them, and sell them for a fraction of what the manufacturer charges.  And if I'd gone out on the web and bought some of the remanufactured cartridges, I wouldn't have been too surprised to see such a message, as there are software ways HP can use to figure out what kind of cartridge was installed. 

But the cartridges I installed came out of an HP box I bought at the same time I bought the printer, and had HP labels all over them, and their expiration dates (if that's what the little date codes ending in 2021 or 2022 meant) were well in the future.  By all reasonable considerations, these cartridges should work in this printer.  But they didn't.

I ended up finding an odd part of HP's website where it instructed me to do a hard reset of the printer (unplugging it and plugging it back in), and if that didn't fix the problem, to answer a series of questions involving the printer's serial number and the date codes and place of manufacture (China or Malaysia) of the cartridges.  When I did that, I was informed that HP will, some day, send me some replacement cartridges, and in the meantime, here's how to print in black and white. 

HP and I go back a long way, though both of us have changed in latter years.  One of my prize surplus-equipment purchases in high school was a World-War-II era knockoff of the famous HP 200-series vacuum-tube audio oscillator that got the company going back in 1938.  It's still sitting in my garage, and the last time I tried to fire it up, it still worked.  During my brief stint in industry, I learned that of all the different kinds of test equipment out there, Hewlett-Packard gear was the ruggedest and most reliable, and typically exceeded its specifications even after a decade of use. 

Around the end of the 20th century, HP decided its future lay in the direction of computers and computer peripherals, and spun off the division that made the super-reliable test equipment.  That division became known as Agilent, and a few years later, Agilent fissioned into a biological and chemical division, which retained the Agilent name, and rid itself of the electrical test-equipment people, who became Keysight.  In the meantime, HP, which merged with the Houston PC maker Compaq somewhere along the way, was not doing that well, and eventually became known mainly for its printers, as far as I'm concerned. 

The consumer and enterprise printer business is a lot different than the lower-volume, sophisticated-customer test equipment business.  From what I can tell, one way to make money with printers is the way Kodak made money with cameras:  they could give the cameras away as long as people kept buying the film from Kodak.  I don't think HP does that with their printers, judging by what I paid for mine.  But it does seem like they could arrange things so that when you buy a set of printer cartridges that say they will work with the printer you just bought, that implied contract doesn't turn out to be a lie.

Admittedly, HP makes a bewildering variety of printers and an equally bewildering variety of cartridges to go with them.  Some cartridges include the printer head, others don't.  The ones I bought are evidently just little tanks with foam-covered outlets that soak the ink into the printer head, which is a separate unit.  I found out how that works when I tried to fix this printer's predecessor.  After replacing its cartridges didn't get it printing again, I ordered a new printer head (again, from some third-party place—they seem to be difficult or impossible to get from HP).  It didn't help, so I wasted about $60 on new cartridges and a printer head before concluding the unit was ready for the junk pile.  (Actually, I donated it to Goodwill, and if they can get it to work again, more power to them.)

But even given all the complications of selling different lineups of printers in different parts of the world, you would think that HP could keep their supply chains straight so you can't go out and buy a box of printer cartridges that say they will work with your printer, and wind up discovering that no, indeed, they don't. 

I'm not the only one with this problem.  A cursory web search turned up at least two sites discussing the fact that if certain packages of HP cartridges have an expiration date earlier than, for example, January 2021 (which is still a good bit in the future), they won't work with certain printers that they are nominally supposed to work with.  Evidently, this is part of a game, or war, that HP is playing in order to stay a step ahead of the recycled-cartridge people.  But now they're updating things so fast that they are obsoleting lots of their own cartridge inventory that is still in the supply chain somewhere.

This is not how the old Hewlett-Packard company would behave.  But that organization is just a fond memory, and now we have to get used to being caught in cartridge-war crossfire if we buy a new printer.  Some day I'll be able to print in color again, but until HP deigns to send me replacement cartridges, I'll just have to settle for a monochrome world.  And by the way, what about these other new cartridges I bought at the same time?

Sources:  Discussions of HP cartridges not working in their designated printers can be found at https://www.therecycler.com/posts/hp-cartridges-wont-work-in-hp-printers/ and https://borncity.com/win/2019/01/20/does-hp-blocks-3rd-party-ink-cartridges-again-on-its-printers-jan-2019/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia entry "Hewlett-Packard." 

Zero Waste: Eccentric Hobby or Wave of the Future?

As I learned from living there during four years of college, California is a land of extremes.  The all-time U. S. record high temperature of 134 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded in Death Valley, which has the lowest land elevation in the U. S. too, and this principle extends to human behavior as well.  A recent post on the San Jose Mercury-News website tells the story of Anne-Marie Bonneau, whose teenage daughter read about floating islands of plastic trash in the oceans back in 2011.  Just as monks and nuns of old took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Ms. Bonneau took a vow then and there to never buy another piece of plastic again. 

She’s still living up to her vow, and has extended the notion of cutting back waste to the extent that she has to take out the garbage only once a year, in a shopping bag (paper, not plastic, no doubt).  Not everybody would care to go to the extremes that Ms. Bonneau does.  She collects glass jars to store liquids in, buys shampoo in bulk, and makes her own deodorant and granola.  Her daughter Charlotte, while she is still on board with the zero-waste idea most of the time, has committed acts of rebellion from time to time, such as buying a plastic water bottle.  And she threatened to leave home if her mother switched from toilet paper to rewashable cloths, so they still buy toilet paper (but not in plastic bags).  Bonneau, whose day job as an editor must leave her with enough energy to run a part-time two-person recycling company and manufacturing firm, admits she is “hard-core.”  But she evidently feels strongly enough about how the planet’s oceans are getting trashed with an estimated 19 billion pounds of plastic every year that it gives her the energy and motivation to do what she and her daughter do along these lines. 

Ms. Bonneau is not alone, though few go almost to the limit of zero waste as she has. Recycling in some form happens in most large cities in the U. S. and smaller towns are catching up too.  While we sometimes think of it as a new idea, nature has been recycling since the beginning of life, at least.  Organic material comes from the soil into plants, animals eat the plants, and both during and after the animal’s life, the material returns to the soil.  And there is a line of thought out there that seems to say if we would only get rid of all this Industrial Revolution stuff—fossil fuels and plastic and climate-change-causing combustion—and live like people did prior to, say, 1500 A. D., then we’d have a sustainable economy and ecosystem. 

The trouble is, there would be a lot fewer of us to enjoy it.  Before Europeans came along, the North American continent supported fewer than a million residents.  And if you think making your own deodorant is hard, try catching enough fish and wildlife every day to live on.  Any archaeologist knows that the most informative thing you can discover about an ancient settlement is its trash heap.  And from trash heaps, we know that even ancient civilizations were pretty wasteful and generated a fair amount of trash.  I don’t know of any numerical comparisons, but my point is that just getting rid of plastic packaging would not automatically solve all our trash problems, though it would help.

Under the present circumstances that prevail in most parts of the U. S., there is not much motivation for those who do not have the exquisitely sensitive global-political conscience of Ms. Bonneau to reduce one’s weekly trash production.  To speak personally, my city provides us with three (plastic, sorry) trash barrels, each capable of holding a couple of cubic yards of stuff.  One is for green waste that presumably goes to a compost pile somewhere, another is for specific types of recyclable materials (plastic, glass, aluminum), and the third is for any general trash that can’t go into the first two.  For what it’s worth, our contribution to the recycle bin is usually larger than our contribution to the trash bin, and I’ve often felt kind of silly tossing one small bag of trash into that great big bin each week.  I suppose I should have felt guilty for using it that much.

Here’s an idea which probably won’t be very popular, because it would cost people money.  But I’ll float it anyway.  The technology exists for trash-pickup trucks to register the net weight of everybody’s trash as they stop and lift it with those big fork kind of things into the truck.  What if you were charged by the pound for your trash?  And what if it was a pretty steep charge after a first flat rate?  That would get a lot of attention from people who currently don’t give a flip about how much stuff they throw out.  It has the advantage of letting folks who value plastic above money to keep doing what they’re doing, but it would re-train the rest of us to buy stuff that leaves less trash behind. 

A brief Internet search turned up a single instance where this idea has been tried:  in 1993, in California, naturally.  A trash-pickup firm serving Thousand Oaks and Ventura experimented with a prototype system from a North Carolina firm.  But on the day a reporter came to witness the first public trial, the system got weights wrong by three to six pounds and missed one trash can entirely.  For whatever reason, even though the idea has been around for more than twenty years, it hasn’t caught on.

So that means if you want to reduce your contribution to the global trash pile, you are more or less on your own.  Ms. Bonneau’s example is out there for anyone who wishes to try it, but outside of the famously ecologically-minded culture of the Bay Area, you may be regarded as a little eccentric.  For most of us, making small changes in what and how we buy things will help some.  For example, after I read Jen Hatmaker’s 7 Experiment:  Staging Your Own Mutiny Against Excess, I started reusing the plastic bag I put my lunch sandwich in, keeping it for a week instead of throwing it away every day and getting a new one.  That’s about as small a change as you can make and still be able to say you’ve done something, but it’s better than nothing, I suppose.

Sources:  The article “Way beyond recycling:  How some Bay Area families are trying to get to zero waste” appeared on the San Jose Mercury-News website on July 20, 2018 at https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/20/way-beyond-recycling-how-some-bay-area-families-are-trying-to-get-to-zero-waste/.  I also referred to the Los Angeles Times story from May 12, 1993, “Pay-Per-Pound Trash Pickup System Tested” at http://articles.latimes.com/1993-05-12/local/me-34368_1_trash-weight.  And if you are interested in why Christians should get with the reduce-waste program, you can read Jen Hatmaker’s book 7 Experiment:  Staging Your Own Mutiny Against Excess published in 2012 by Lifeway Christian Resources.