At the moment I’m rather tempted to trade in my old Kindle Paperwhite (7th gen) and buy a Kindle Paperwhite Kids. I’d get 20€ for the old Kindle and 20% off the new one. Moneywise that would be ok for me, but here’s my problem: I hate to produce e-waste. When I want to buy a new gadget and the old one still works I’m looking for someone who can use the old one.I don’t want to throw it away because producing this stuff costs an enormous amount of ressources. As I’ve never seen old Kindles for sale on Amazon I fear they just throw the old ones they get via trade in away and I wouldn’t want that.
I’ve found nothing about that on the internet. Does anyone know something about that?
Landfill.
I found this article informative. Basically, they’ll try to refurbish it and resell it if there’s a market for it, and if not, they will offload it to a recycling partner, who will utilize a pretty broad spectrum of strategies to minimize how much of it ends up in a landfill. I doubt you’ll ever get a complete breakdown of what will happen though.
I have a friend that works in the Kindle trade-in team, I should ask him.
divedivedive’s gonna disappear suddenly after Bezos puts a hitman on him.
Considering how well old e-ink devices perform compared to other electronic devices over time, I would assume that it’s in Amazon’s best interest just to make sure that they disappear so that they’re not available for people to purchase rather than laying out the big bucks for the latest and greatest versions.
I mean, I could go back to my old Sony PRS-650 pretty easily if I had to.
It’s only a matter of time before it ends up in a landfill. Could be tomorrow, could be 20 years from now after more years of use by whoever you pass it down to.
There is no such thing as plastic recycling though, after China closed off accepting plastic from the rest of the world.
They probably strip out the battery for lithium recycling. Maybe the electronics can also be crushed and sorted for any metals. Plastic will get buried.
That’s the same for us :P
I feel you. I won’t presume to tell you what to do nor would I judge any decision anyone makes in this matter, but my humble point of view is that Kindles are one of the few electronics in life that can have a loooong lifespan if you let them. Better to turn away from the Qt3 kindle thread and not look at the Amazon product pages of the new shinies and instead think about what book to enjoy and discover next.
I keep my old Kindles. One of them is usually in the bag I leave the house with. The one before that is one I bring to the beach. I don’t care if that one gets ruined.
I guess that’s what I do. All in all I like my old gadgets, my PS Vita, 3DS, my Paperwhite. Just sometimes there’s this “Oh, new, shiny”. But I hate how throwing away valuable things has become normal.
I keep my old DAPs, but the Sansa Fuze popped open sometime in the past year or so. Capacitors or battery must have swelled up.
My old company has buckets for recycling batteries and small electronics in the mail room of every building, and the giant condo building where my chick lives now put out a big bin for them once a year. There are storefronts in SF where you can take electronics (including old PCs, TVs, anything) for recycling, but you have to pay them, by weight, and it’s not cheap. I’d be surprised if a notoriously cheap company like Amazon would spring for that.