Six Degrees of Separation

A photo of my presentation board on graphics tablets.

The flow chart I made of my product, its components, the components of its components, and where everything came from.

Write Up

For this project, I researched the components of a tool I use for drawing every weekend or so: my tablet. The model I use is a Wacom Intuos3 Pen Tablet, which uses a USB cord to connect to the computer and comes with a mouse (called a puck), a battery-less pen and its stand, and some extra pen nibs for when the older plastic ones get worn down. The research I did was based around this model, though for my presentation I used a generic model since taking apart a Wacom to find out what it was made out of would be costly, not to mention illegal since Wacom’s designs are patented and protected.

Wacom is a Japan-based company, but their products are manufactured in China and shipped all over the world. I explored many of the components that make up the tablet, the pen, the puck, and the packaging. I also looked into where the tablet goes after it has reached the end of its lifespan.

First, I’ll talk about the packaging. Like most things you buy, it comes in a cardboard box. That cardboard box has been printed with inks, made out of pigments and dyes, using the flexographic process. The flexographic printing process is what makes it look shiny and high-quality, since cardboard usually absorbs ink and makes it spongy and dull. The cardboard itself is made out of various types of paper, glued together using a starch-based adhesive. The paper comes from woody trees and plants, things with cellulose in general, which use a lot of water and sunlight to grow. These trees and plants are cut down and made into paper by a factory, of course, and there are numerous costs involved in making it—like electricity, gas, delivery, packaging, and much more.

Moving on, plastics are a common product in almost everything, and tablets are no exception. My Wacom Intuos3 has a sleek resin coating on top and plastic buttons—its whole shell is pretty much plastic. Seeing as tablets, as well as most other technologies, are made in China, the materials to make it are probably mined or manufactured there too. It’s made of rubber, celluloid, heat and radiation, and thermosetting polymers or thermoplastics, which in itself is made by celluloid and rubber as well. Resin is also a component in plastic, and those come from trees, particularly coniferous ones like pine trees.

The pen and puck are made of plastic too, and both of them also include rubber. The most common type of rubber used in technology industries is silicone rubber, since it’s easy to obtain and mold. It’s made of an elastomer or elastic polymer, and is a saturated rubber, meaning it can’t be cured by sulfur vulcanization—in other words, can’t be made into something more hard and durable. This too is produced in China.

The puck has other components besides plastic and rubber, of course. It’s also got a felt material on the bottom to keep it from scratching the tablet surface, similar to the pen stand which is also made of plastic and felt. It also has its own printed circuit board (PCB), which is what makes it function internally. But I’ll get into PCBs more in depth later. Since I’ve talked a little about the puck, I’ll talk about the pen too.

The pen, also called a stylus, for a Wacom Tablet is unique in the sense that it is a cordless, battery-free pen, which makes it slender for ease of use. Tablet pens are able to connect and function with the tablet easily because it has an LC coil and capacitor circuit inside. An LC coil, also known as a resonant circuit or tuned circuit, has an inductor (represented by the letter L) that stores energy in a magnetic field created by an electrical current, and a capacitor (represented by the C) that is composed of a pair of conductors separated by a dialectric insulator. When a voltage passes over the capacitor, it creates a static electric field which is stored in the dialectric. The LC circuit receives an electromagnetic signal from the graphics tablet, which is what allows tablets to sense pressure and if the stylus is touching the drawing surface or not.

The most research I could do on any component of a tablet, however, was on the printed circuit board. The PCB is the main reason a tablet can function—everything else was just a shell to protect it from damage and such. The PCB is a series of conducted pathways that connect it to other electronic components, such as a USB cord which can be connected to a computer. It tracks signals etched from copper sheets that were laminated to a non-conductive substrate such as fiberglass. There are many components to a PCB, as well as methods of making them and their individual parts. Silk-screening, photoengraving methods, through-hole construction, and surface-mount construction are all methods used in the construction of a PCB. It also uses many metals, such as heavy copper in sheets or foil, tin and lead, anti-corrosion materials such as gold or nickel or soder to mask it, and tungsten and carbon for the drill bits to make holes in the PCB to mount it. There are various elements involved as well, like ammonium persulfate, hydrochloric acid, and ferric chloride, and it has other materials for packaging and protection like antistatic bags, conformal coating, conductive ink, and dialectric.

PCB is made with fiberglass, which is made of plastic and glass, which is made using heat and sand. It’s also kept together using epoxy cement or adhesive, which is made of resin and polyamine. Copper sheets are etched onto it using electroplating techniques, which include the use of electric currents, water, and metal. It goes through oxidation as well, using chemicals like SO4, which is a sulfate, or salt or sulfuric acid.

Because of these metals and plastics that go into making a PCB, the tablet, the pen, and puck in general, it can’t be thrown away when it becomes useless. It has to be taken to a recycling center to be “properly disposed of”, which then ships it across the country and to China to be taken apart. They use boats, planes, trucks, and all sorts of vehicles to move it around. That in itself takes a lot of fuel, which contributes to pollution.

When the tablet is dismantled in China, the only parts that are saved and recycled are the precious metals, like gold and nickel and such, but the other things like plastic are trashed. The bad working conditions means that workers will have health issues, such as malnutrition and exposure to toxins in the plastics they are working with. The poison also contributes to pollution and contamination, both of which lead to lowered fertility rates and birth defects, and, often, death. Due to these effects, the population of China is altered in a negative manner.

Despite its small size and seemingly simple construction, the tablet is a complex thing comprised of multiple parts, which are comprised of even more parts. These impact the environment and economy through the numerous methods of creation and transportation, as well as the toxins and gases the products release as they are manufactured, so it’s a large contributor to pollution. Its production is the source of poor working conditions, low labor cost and income, health issues and lack of help, and indefinitely, the death of hundreds and maybe even thousands of people who live in the electronic wastelands of China.