This article is a mixed bag. The tone was a bit Apple-bashing, but there were nuggets at the core that made the whole thing worth reading.

Some highlights:

Three years after their debut, a generation of AirPods is nearing obsolescence as their lithium-ion batteries degrade (or they get lost or dropped down the toilet) and owners upgrade to the new model, which came out in March.

My AirPods started to degrade at the beginning of the year, to the point where the shortened battery life started to get in the way for me. As the article points out, there was no way for me to change out the batteries and the cost of Apple doing it made the possibility of a refresh not cost-effective.

I bought the new rev when they went on sale, passed along my old ones. They still do work, after all.

The environmental case against AirPods rests on four main points. First, they don’t last long: Lithium-ion batteries degrade over time, and there have been reports of AirPods failing to hold a charge after as little as 18 months. Second, they can’t be repaired: You can’t crack them open without special tools (and possibly some bloodshed), and even if you could, the components inside are tangled and glued together. Third, they can’t easily be recycled for the same reasons. And finally, it’s irresponsible to throw them in the trash both because they contain minerals that were mined at significant human cost and because their batteries could pose fire and toxicity hazards in waste dumps — though this is true of most modern gadgets.

All fair points. Apple’s response:

As with all of our products, we work closely with our recyclers to ensure AirPods are properly recycled and provide support to recyclers outside of our supply chain as well

I have to say, Apple does make it easy to return their products to them for recycling. You can bring pretty much any Apple device you own to Apple for recycling or, for newer devices, for a trade-in. Here’s a link to Apple’s trade-in page.

That said, the author raises a fair question about the recyclability of AirPods:

Wistron confirmed to me that you can recycle key portions of AirPods, notably the battery, from which the mineral cobalt can be extracted. The problem is that the value of what can be recycled is unlikely to cover the cost of recovering it. With no automated system that can safely open AirPods or extract their components, each device has to be opened by a worker using hand tools, like pliers and jigs. Their first goal is to cleanly dislodge the battery and then the audio drivers, which can also contain precious metals. The battery is sent on to a specialized smelter to extract the cobalt, which can be reused, while the drivers are sent to precious metal refiners.

At the end of the day, the value of the material recovered from AirPods does not appear to cover the cost of recycling them. And that value is what drives recycling.