Those old enough to have owned deep desktop monitors will remember the joy of finally replacing them with a flat screen. They probably also recycled the old monitor — but have they thought about what happened to it afterwards?
The 2018 Austrian documentary Welcome to Sodom documents approximately 6,000 people living at one of the world's largest electrical waste disposal sites, in Accra, Ghana. It is a confronting account of the consequences of modern consumer society and the afterlife of electronics we no longer want.
What we do to reduce our impact
We are aware that, as an electronics company, we contribute to this problem. We try to mitigate it in the following ways:
- Recyclable packaging: We use packaging materials that can be recycled, and we try to minimise the amount of packaging we use.
- Digital documentation: Our manuals and guides are available online at lunaticoastro.com/doc/ — we ship as little paper as possible.
- Electronic software delivery: Software is downloaded directly — no physical media.
- No bundled chargers: Where possible, we ship products without chargers, since most customers already have compatible ones.
- Repairability: We prioritise repair over replacement for defective products. Spare parts are available for most of our products, and we actively encourage customers to repair rather than discard.
- Low energy consumption: We design for low power consumption across all products.
Have ideas for other things we could do? Share them on the Lunatico forum. We are genuinely interested.