Skullcandy doesn't want you to buy more headphones: Taking a stand against electronic waste, the company wants you to keep using your old ones.

• Author: Alsever, Jennifer

THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS industry is notorious for environmental waste. Companies built their business models upon designing products that will not last and then encouraging consumers to replace them every couple of years.

Headphone maker Skullcandy is heading in the other direction.

The Park City-based company is designing its earbuds and headphones for the long haul with "Skull-iQ," which includes hardware and components that can be "turned on" months or years later for additional audio features. With firmware updates, the regular wireless headphones you bought six months ago could suddenly get noise cancelation or trigger a number of various branded voice assistants.

"We've futureproofed them," says Nelson Fortier, Skullcandy's VP of marketing. "We want to make our devices last longer--not just physically, but we want them to be relevant longer, too."

That kind of sustainable design is unusual in consumer tech, which tends to build products with "planned obsolescence" in mind, meaning devices are not designed to last or work with future software. As a result, Americans spend an estimated $1,480 per household each year on new electronics, discarding 6.9 million tons of electronic waste (e-waste), according to a report by the Public Interest Research Group.

That's a big problem for the environment. A 2019 World Economic Forum report called e-waste "the fastest-growing waste stream in the world." Much of that waste is incinerated, dumped in landfills, or shipped to undeveloped countries, creating public health and environmental hazards. When that e-waste is exposed to heat, toxic chemicals are released into the air, damaging the atmosphere. Toxic elements like lead, mercury, and cadmium can leak into the groundwater, affecting the environment further.

Making new products is also an issue. There is the environmental cost of mining materials, the energy used to produce them, and the carbon emissions from transportation, marketing, and packaging. The manufacturing of three new laptops, for instance, emits 1 ton of C02, according to data from the Geneva Environment Network, a cooperative of 75 environment organizations.

Large tech companies have made moves to source more sustainable materials and cut factory emissions. For instance, Apple reported that its assembly sites for its products are certified zero waste to landfill, and it has decreased average product energy use by 70 percent in the last 10 years. Google, however, began issuing...