Chromebooks are the true budget laptops utilising ChromeOS which are commonly used in schools due to their cheap costs and as it turns out in a SHOCKING revelation cheap, poorly made, underperforming laptops create lots of E-Waste.
Chromebook’s In Education Create Piles of E-Waste
In a report conducted by the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), it was found that an estimated 31 million Chromebooks were sold at the start of the pandemic and most of them are getting close to their expiration dates. Chromebooks were popular for schools to help students with remote learning due to their cheap costs, but they come at the further cost of a poor life span. In the report, it was found that these Chromebooks had contributed around 9 million tons of CO2 emissions and also found that doubling the lifespan of these devices could equate to removing around 900,000 cars from the roads.
How Is Google Responding To This?
A Google spokesperson spoke to Businessinsider.com about this issue and has claimed that since 2020 they now “provide eight years of automatic updates, up from five years in 2016” and are also working with their manufacturing partners to build more economical and repairable devices. The repairability of Chromebooks was another concern raised by the US PIRG report as they tested 11 Chromebooks and found the repairability and parts availability to be below average. Repairability was scored out of 10 in which the Chromebooks scored an average of 5/10 whilst parts availability was scored out of 20 and scored a measly 3.3/20.
I’m not surprised at this at all, churning out a bunch of cheap laptops that run awfully so that kids can continue to learn at home was just set to backfire immensely, in terms of E-Waste and also in terms of children’s educations being wasted at home on these Chromebooks whilst everyone panicked about the elderly.
You can read the full report from the PIRG here, Let us know what you think.
