Fighting electronic waste: How Polaroid made it into the 21st century

Polaroid is a photographic icon and one of the Western world’s better-known brands. Synonymous with instant, fun photography, for many years Polaroid also stood for groundbreaking technology and innovation. 

Created in 1937 by Harvard drop-out turned inventor Edwin Land, Polaroid turned Kodak’s ‘you take the picture, we do the rest’ principle into ‘you take the picture, the camera does the rest’. Polaroid cut out the middleman from the photographic equation to provide people with instant photography. This allowed for novel uses of the technology such as in forensics, as well as new ways of experiencing photography as a social activity.

The possibility of experiencing photographic images after just a few minutes, passing them around or giving them as gifts, created a new relationship between the photographer and their subject.

Regardless of its popularity—by 1983 it was estimated that 46.3% of American households owned a self-developing camera—the late 1980s saw a decline that continued until the 2000s, when the Polaroid Corporation declared bankruptcy twice, sold most of its manufacturing sites around the world, and declared that film production was coming to an end.

Digital photography is often seen as the culprit, but was really just the last nail in the coffin—the Corporation’s problems began many years before the arrival of digital technology. 

With nobody to manufacture the film once the Polaroid Corporation folded, the millions of Polaroid cameras in the world were suddenly declared obsolete. But Polaroid practitioners weren’t going to let that happen: they worked together to create petitions and pleaded with the company to save the format. 

Cameras becoming obsolete was something that resonated among Polaroid practitioners, who besides campaigning started to look for hands-on solutions themselves. Andy, a long-term Polaroid practitioner working in South-East London recalls how, upon hearing the news of Polaroid stopping film production, his first thought was for ‘all the perfectly operative cameras that would end up in landfills’. His response was to start work on a system to retrofit Polaroid cameras to work with other film formats. 

This sort of ingenuity wasn’t a new practice. Polaroid practitioners have been upcycling their cameras for a long time. For example, Polaroid Land cameras were reworked to fit new batteries, and plastic cartridges for peel-apart film were changed for original metal ones to avoid jamming. 

Repair and upcycling techniques, along with the UK’s right to repair legislation, show that there’s real interest in tackling waste and heading towards more sustainable electronic consumption. And although the new integral film and peel-apart film are not the same as the originals and therefore don’t produce the same results, both projects show that in the hands of driven communities, planned obsolescence can be challenged and contested. 

Of course, neither Polaroid nor other analogue photographic technologies are zero waste, and they have environmental impacts—whether the use of plastic cartridges and batteries that are not currently recyclable, or chemicals that might damage the environment. At the same time, many smartphones and digital cameras are extremely hard to repair (and the Right to Repair bill doesn’t include them), which means going digital doesn’t solve the waste problem.

The answer seems to lie in balancing consumption and waste, and empowering people to take (repair) matters into their own hands. Rather than accepting the rising tide of avoidable waste, we can take inspiration from these novel upcycling methods and ingenuity in sourcing parts and consumables—and keep our things out of landfill.