[crazygringo]

Seriously, I never understand the "environmental waste" argument as applied to AirPods.

The pair of buds weighs a third of a single disposable AA battery. There's less plastic than in an average Chinese takeout container.

If you want to complain that they're expensive to replace then go ahead. But as soon as anyone brings up the environment, give me a break. We're not talking about a 65" television that weight 55 pounds, c'mon. Each bud is four grams of mass.

If people threw out twenty pairs of AirPods a day, then sure let's worry about the environmental issue. But when they replace one pair every two to three years? I don't think so.

[bluescrn]

It just feels like a disposable $159 product is vastly more wasteful than a disposable <$1 AA battery

[Others]

1. The parent comment is referring to waste in the environmental sense. Nature does not care how expensive the trash was--just the volume/composition 2. It's a big stretch to call AirPods "disposable" I (and many others) keep them for years. In the long run everything is rubbish; an expensive electronic device that lasts for years and years is not "disposable"

[Wowfunhappy]

> Nature does not care how expensive the trash was

No, but the price is often a stand-in for how much energy/carbon it took to make the product, which is what I always assumed was the case here. I'd love to be wrong...

[SilverRed]

I suspect that the airpods are expensive because of how difficult it is to manufacture them rather than material use. They probably require the latest factories with time consuming manual labor to pack them all in the case and glue it up. As well as a thick markup that you $1 battery doesn't have.

[hndamien]

The price is usually more indicative of how much value it creates for the buyer, with a lower bound being how much it costs the producer to produce.

[JoBrad]

I think the problem is volume > individual cost. Apple sold 60 million AirPods in 2019[1]. That number has surely gone up in 2020 and may even be larger in 2021.

1 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-sold-nearly-60-million...

[recycledmatt]

If we use the 4 gram number, 240 million grams is about 264 tons. In recycling terms, that is really nothing - the equivalent of about 10 well packed sea containers or 13 tractor trailers. Some decent size single facilties can do that in a day.

[JoBrad]

But a gram of AirPods is more expensive to recycle than a gram of plastic, because it’s more complex. That makes it more expensive, and presumably less likely to be recycled after being discarded.

[recycledmatt]

The recycling isn’t the expensive part, it’s the collection. If someone had 20 tons of these, they might actually be able to be paid for the value. It would most likely go to a battery smelter and they would burn / melt off the non-battery in the slag. Imagine collecting 20 tons 4 grams at a time though, and when they come in it is not 100 or 1000 units at a time, it’s one mixed with many other categories of material.

The real complexity is in a clean, sorted and segregated stream to recycle large quantity’s at once, and I don’t see that given the fractured state of current collections.

[slim]

The airpods are compared to wired ear buds. Once Apple removed the jack port, they effectively created the added waste which was not there before.

[gnicholas]

True, although my wired Apple headphones never lasted more than two years, which seems to be roughly the useful life of AirPods.

[theshrike79]

YMMV.

I'm on my second pair of airpods since launch. (Left pod on the previous pair stopped connecting).

As for wired headphones, no pair lasts over 2 years in my use. The cord always gets tangled and broken and off to the bin they go. No matter how thick, thin or even swappable the cord is, I still manage to break them.

It's wireless or silence for me =)

[swiley]

They're replacing wired headphones which were only thrown out after physically breaking and didn't put batteries in landfills.

[ddingus]

I really dislike batteries in this use case and basically bought 10 years worth of great wired earbuds for like $50.

[shoo]

It'd be interesting to know how much mass of stuff needs to be dug/refined/shipped/disposed of to produce four grams of airpod.

e.g. to produce 1 gram of some metal you might need to mine and process 100+ grams of ore

[crazygringo]

Welcome to manufacturing. How much ore do you think it takes to make a roll of aluminum foil that sells for $3?

Obviously it takes more than 4g of raw materials to produce AirPods. But it takes extra material to make pretty much everything. So comparison-wise, it's still a tiny, tiny amount next to your TV or even laptop.