Why it's growing

The volume is rising much faster than the population. Four reasons, and none of them is that people got more wasteful.

1. Replacement cycles got shorter

A phone is replaced far sooner than it stops working. Some of that is genuine improvement — cameras did get better. Much of it is that the replacement is made easy and continuous: carrier upgrade offers, trade-in credit, monthly instalments that never quite end.

The result is a device leaving service while it still functions perfectly. That is a very different failure from a device that broke.

2. Repair got harder

This one is deliberate, and Module 4 covers it properly. The short version:

Batteries are glued in. A battery is the first component to wear out, and in most modern devices it is fixed with adhesive rather than clips or screws. Replacing a worn battery becomes a heat-gun-and-prying job instead of a sixty-second swap — which turns a routine repair into a specialist one.

Components are soldered down. Memory and storage used to be modules you could upgrade. Increasingly they're soldered to the mainboard, so a machine that only needs more storage needs a whole new mainboard.

Parts and manuals are restricted. If the official part is unavailable and the service documentation is confidential, independent repair depends on salvage and guesswork.

None of this is illegal, and manufacturers offer real arguments for some of it — thinner devices, better water resistance, tighter security. Those arguments deserve a fair hearing, which Module 4 gives them. But the effect is not in dispute: repair is harder than it was.

3. It's often cheaper to replace than to repair

Follow the economics from the owner's side, because they are rational.

A screen repair on a mid-range phone can approach the cost of a newer handset on a trade-in deal. A laptop out of warranty needing a mainboard is quoted close to the price of a new one. Meanwhile labour costs rise and manufacturing costs fall, so the gap widens every year.

At that point the owner is not choosing waste. They are choosing the cheaper option, which is exactly what you would expect them to do. The waste is a consequence of the price signal, not the person.

This is why "just repair things" is weak advice on its own and why Module 3 spends time on extended producer responsibility — who pays determines what happens.

4. There are simply more devices

Twenty years ago a household might have had a computer. Now it plausibly has several phones, a couple of laptops, a tablet, a television, a games console, a speaker, a watch, a doorbell, and a scattering of things with batteries nobody thinks of as electronics at all.

More devices per person, more people, shorter lives each. Multiply those together and the curve in the last lesson stops being surprising.

What follows from this

If the growth were caused by carelessness, the fix would be persuasion.

It isn't. It is caused by design decisions, pricing, and product strategy — which means the fix is partly regulatory, partly a repair economy, and only partly individual behaviour.

That doesn't make individual action pointless. It makes it the beginning rather than the whole answer, and it should change what you push for: not just "please recycle", but repairable design, available parts, and a collection route so convenient that the drawer stops being the path of least resistance.

Module action

Run the household audit properly.

Count every unused device. Write down what each one is, roughly how old, and whether you think it still powers on. Then post the total — to your class, your group, or wherever this course reached you.

The count matters more than it looks. It converts a global abstraction into one true local fact, and a true local fact is the only thing that reliably gets anyone else to open their own drawer.