100 Million Printers, 3 Empire State Buildings. Is This Really Something to Celebrate?
HP is running a promotional campaign about it’s 100 millionth HP LaserJet printer shipped since 1984. Seriously, given the built-in obsolescence that seems to be an unspoken “feature” of most consumer printers, I question whether this is something to be proud of, or even mention.
What do 100 million printers mean? Read on.
Let’s do some non-scientific guestimation here on the impact of 100 million printers over the last 22 years.
An informal survey tells me that most people I know (who buy printers, obviously) have had to replace their printer (HP, or otherwise) about 6 times since 1984. If we get conservative (and give HP the benefit of the doubt, recognizing their hardware’s good anecdotal track record) and assume that maybe 2 out of 5 HP printers purchased since that year have since been discarded, then that’s 40 million HP LaserJet printers in the garbage.
Looking at the HP announcement, we see that 1984 printers weigh 71 lbs. and 2006 printers weigh 43.8 lbs. For this 22 year timespan, let’s assume, then, that’s about 57 lbs. per printer. That’s 2.28 billion pounds of plastic and metal (if my math’s correct? Lemme know).
And that translates into 47,174 metric tonnes per year on average in landfills (note that’s just HP LaserJet printers, not any of their other product lines, nor their competitors, like Epson or Lexmark).
The Empire State Building weighs 330,000 metric tonnes. So, in our rough guestimation, we threw away about three Empire State Building’s worth of HP LaserJet printers in the past 22 years.
Sure, that’s just a drop in the ocean compared to the 132 million tons of solid waste trucked away to landfills every year in the United States alone. But still. We can design ways to avoid this. We can. But we need to get our priorities straight.
The time is coming when it will not be “cool” to be a reckless consumer. In fact, the trend toward eco-friendly consumption has been in the works for a long time. And that’s probably the key to making true change — the market goes where consumers go (it can be said otherwise, but I’ve yet to see it on a grand scale). So maybe the trick is to use our slickest marketing tools and manipulations into making obsolescence unfashionable. Is it possible? I think so.
But the pathetic reality is that, for now, and despite my complaining and holier-than-thou grand-standing here, I will probably end up opting for the saving-my-money route. Screw the environment. I need a printer. NOW.
It’s still cooler to make money than to save the world.
Oh well.
Here’s some help for those of you willing to fight the power and reanimate your own defunct printer: http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/