Thoughts on the Necessity of Smart Appliances

Introduction

In today’s digital world, new technologies are being created and released at a rate faster than many people can consume. In many ways, major companies are moving towards our technologies becoming “smart”. A lot of technologies like laptops, cellphones, speakers, televisions, and video game consoles have been connected to the internet for several years now, and many are beginning to become compatible with “smart” Artificial Intelligence technologies like Alexa or Siri.

It is no secret that these products have been leaving quite the ecological AND human footprint. In Ghana, leftover electronics from the first world countries are piled en-masse. Citizens of Ghana that have to work in or around this dump suffer “burns, back problems, and infected wounds, […] as well as respiratory problems, chronic nausea, and debilitating headaches.” (Citylab.com) In China, factory chemicals pollute the air and block out the sun (Weforum.org), and suffer on average 1.1 million premature deaths (South China Morning Post).

With this much damage being done with the tech we already have now, one would think companies may want to consider cutting down on releasing even more “smart” technologies.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Artificial Intelligence enabled kitchen appliances are currently projected to “reach revenues of more than $600 million by 2024,” according to PRNewswire.com. Smart kitchen appliances are advertised as the future of homeowning, allowing users to use voice commands to pre-heat an oven or turn on the dishwasher away from home (PRNewswire.com). Some of the upcoming “smart” appliances include smart toasters, smart kettles, even smart lunchboxes! (makeuseof.com)
With the upcoming economic projections, it seems that companies like Amazon, Samsung and more are not going to slow down on the production of these new “smart” kitchen appliances. What is the cost of such a convenient lifestyle?

PART ONE: Ecological and Human footprint

Let’s take a closer look at one of these “smart” appliances. One of the more current smart appliances being sold on the market right now is Samsung’s FamilyHub smart refrigerator.

The refrigerator boasts a touch screen display that performs several functions. One function is the ability to view inside the refrigerator without having to open the door. Not only can you view this on the on-screen unit, but you can also see into your fridge at all times from your mobile phone. Another feature of the fridge is a Family Board, that you can customize with pictures, a calendar, notes and more. The fridge also can stream Spotify or Netflix movies on its touch screen display. Finally, you can control all of your other Samsung Smart Things with the fridge using the SmartThings app.

To break down this fridge into the essentials, the “smart” part of the refrigerator is the large tablet rigged to the front and the 3 internal cameras. The rest of the refrigerator is a traditional Samsung refrigerator. The regular parts of the fridge include the following provided by Samsung.com:

However, for the purposes of combatting smart appliances, we need to think of the “smart” features of the appliances separately. Samsung doesn’t provide what is in the “smart” tablet part of the fridge, but since it contains the same parts and features of a tablet or cell phone, we can at least use this data from Samsung.com to estimate what types of materials are used when making the “smart” tablet on the fridge.

As you can see from the noted images, many parts of this fridge include rare earth metals. According to the Guardian, China produces 85% percent of all the world’s rare earth metals. Mining and refining the 17 rare Earth materials that are essential to creating smartphones, tablets, and now refrigerators, is noted as a “dirty business”. These materials are often full of radioactive by-products that get released during the refinement process. “Processing one tone of rare earth metals produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste,” and is leaving a widening hole in Bayan Obo, with pits as deep as 1,000 meters, spanning 48sq kilometers. Workers experience poor working conditions, and the increased mining pits are threatening local water sources (The Guardian).

The other hidden technology in any smart appliance is the AI that comes with voice recognition technology. Training cloud-based AI like voice recognition inside Samsung’s FamilyHub refrigerator “can emit as much as 626,155lb of carbon dioxide,” (the Guardian). This is because these devices need to constantly be connected to electricity and draw large amounts of power to access the cloud, and the cloud itself requires multitudes of electricity in order to even remain online.

Now, Samsung itself as a company is striving to do better for the environment. Samsung is working closely to ensure they are becoming more and more sustainable. Samsung plans to have all its packaging be 100% sourced from paper from sustainable forests by 2020. Samsung also has met its goal to recycle 95% of waste products in 2016. (Samsung.com)

PART 2: What would this do for my community?

However, even with Samsung’s improvements, this does not mean it helps the issues I highlighted above for every company making smart kitchen appliances.

The community I value most is my home town. My hometown’s electricity is generated by solar panels. (nrcm.org) I have a beautiful yard, nature all around me, and am happy to breathe air cleaner than others are able. My community is slightly behind technologically, and it would be surprising to find a family with a smart kitchen appliance.

The one foreseeable benefit to my community, if we were to start producing smart kitchen appliances, would be an increase in available jobs to members of the community. It is fair to say in my rural home town that we do not have that many jobs available to us locally, especially since the mill is closed down and the tomato farm now outsources labor to migrant workers.

However, I think with what I have learned above about the harms of mining and processing raw materials for smart appliances, I would not like that kind of job to open up in my community. Giant mines that sacrifice water sources and toxic chemicals released by refining rare metals would uproot the very things I value about my community. Our homes would not be safe to live in and the workers would be treated very poorly. I think many in my community would prefer having to commute for work rather than living in such terrible conditions.
When considering the convenience of smart appliances over the cost, they do not seem like a necessary technology to have in our homes. Traditional kitchen appliances also create enough pollutions as is, but adding to our e-waste by making them “smart” seems even more excessive. When you think about the people in Ghana that already have to deal with so much e-waste, and the people in China getting cancer from refining raw metals for the smart devices we already have, the cost is far too great to push smart versions of devices that already work effectively in the form they exist now.

PART 3: The process of eliminating technologies

There are already many environmental and ethical committees that create regulations on how certain technologies need to be made and broken down once they become waste. Global movements such as the Paris Climate Agreement have been created in order to create these types of regulations.

However, there are always ways to slip through the cracks of these types of agreements via loopholes and outsourcing waste management to third-party companies who don’t necessarily fall under the rules set in place. Sometimes, it may be necessary to ban certain products outright from being introduced to the consumer market.
For food and drugs, the FDA is able to make this decision on what products can come to market. Movies, Video Games, and other forms of media can also be banned from being accessible in certain countries. For technology, however, the push to ban certain devices has been quiet.

In May 2019, though, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to ban the purchase of telecommunications products that may pose “pose a threat to national security”, (New York Times) so now the idea of banning technology specifically, is not out of the question.
It would be interesting to see a new form for environmental laws focused around looking at the problems of e-waste and halting the idea of advancing technology just for the sake of doing so- as in making refrigerators stream Netflix just because we can.