The Lights Are Going Down on a Throwaway Equipment Culture
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Simply throwing out electrical equipment and updating to ‘this year’s model’ is wasteful, expensive and causes problems of pollution and toxins, especially in emerging economies. It does not have to be this way.
“We have noticed that the vast majority of issues that organizations tend to blame on software are actually about hardware components and can be repaired,” says Willian Santos of ABI Electronics. PCB components can be recovered, repaired and replaced as good as new.
Watch below the highlights from the podcast!
1/6 Military electronic systems repair: Custom parts Vs COTS
The adoption of COTS (commercial parts) by the military increases exposure to component shortages & programmed obsolescence. Learn how ABI helps defence organisations build the technical capabilities to keep projects going for longer across the world.
2/6 How can mission-critical systems be refurbished?
Train for repair, defeat programmed obsolescence and reduce Ewaste: the brilliant story from the U.S NationalGuard engineer who saved US$10Million to the U.S taxpayers using ABI’s BoardMaster It all starts by implementing a strategy during the in-service years where faults are diagnosed, corrected, and logged. By doing so, when obsolescence comes in, like in the example mentioned in the video, the business will have developed the internal capabilities required to repair systems that the OEM themselves will argue “are impossible to be repaired”.
3/6 Do repaired electronics perform as well as brand new?
A repaired unit can perform as brand new or even better. As it is routine for repaired equipment to operate to at least the same standard as new units, there is little excuse for the traditional model to persist.
4/6 How does ABI work with equipment manufacturers to speed up repairs.
The brands behind industrial technologies stand to benefit much from partnering with ABI as this video shows. Servitisation powered by ABI’s exclusive repair technologies is reducing waste and generating profits for businesses small and big.
5/6 What are the financial and environmental benefits of repair over replace?
In this video, ABI’s Willian Santos discusses the financial and environmental benefits of having electronic circuit boards repaired rather than replaced.
6/6 In-house electronics repair: challenges, benefits and opportunities.
Improve scheduled maintenance, extend the life of critical assets, reduce emissions and create jobs. These are some of the tangible benefits of in-house repair but finding people with the right training and skills set can be a challenge in some regions and industries. Education, therefore, needs to stand up to the challenge. Design for repair, train for repair, and not just train students to build stuff then replace crucial parts when they get faulty creating more waste. Unless more is done on the education front, how will the Right to Repair movement even make sense if we can’t find skilled people to help us repair electronics?
