The article calls it an "estimate, based on global trade data". It links to neither the data nor how the estimate was made.
It does say the estimate was given by "the international waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) forum" - perhaps someone has an institutional interest in that number being high.
I agree. According to data compiled by Statista, there are 15 billion smartphones in existence right now, and "only" 1.5 billion sold per year. So by next year, we're going to have 30% fewer devices?
From googling: “The worldwide mobile phone market 1,655.7 million units shipped in 2021”, “Global smartphone market 1.39 billion units in 2021”, “In 2021, the number of mobile devices operating worldwide stood at almost 15 billion”. I couldn’t find feature-phone production numbers split out - but poorer people won’t replace phones unless they have to so smart-phone waste is more likely to be relevant.
Lots of people retire a phone a year, many more after 2, but these phone tend to be resold as refurbs, and not even close to 5billion people own their own phone at all.
Honestly, I find it really hard to get worked up about cell phone e-waste in the grand scheme of environmental issues.
People seem to confuse the cost of something new with the harm in throwing it away -- they get upset about $250 AirPods not getting recycled, while they don't give a second thought to throwing away a couple pairs of $1 AAA batteries, when it's about the same level of landfill impact.
Or in this case, they think there's something wrong with throwing away a 5 oz (140 g) cell phone, but don't feel particularly bad when they finally dispose of an old 50 lb (22 kg) air conditioner -- or a 3,000 lb (1,360 kg) car. (Using these numbers, one car is the same mass of material as almost 10,000 phones.)
Putting it into perspective, cell phones are nothing. There's more glass used to make a jar of peanut butter, and you throw away more plastic after a family-sized Chinese takeout meal.
And yes if there are precious metals inside that can be recovered, then let's recover those -- but only if it's economical. Because that's a pure question of economics. We don't need to be "virtuous" -- if markets really think the metal is going to be that valuable because we're going to run out, then they will pay you accordingly handsomely for your old broken phones. But it doesn't seem like we've reached that point yet, because nobody's paying anything.
Yeah, the article isn't great, talking about hazardous substances and such.
Phones are moving to "chip scale" components: resistors, inductors, capacitors less than 0.25mm in size. And the chips themselves are getting smaller and smaller. The quantity of "hazardous" stuff outside of the battery is plummeting.
Making the battery removable and replaceable and having fully-reticulated battery collection networks would be nice.
On cost, though: there is the concept of "embodied energy". The AirPods cost $250 while the peanut butter jar costs less than $1, in part because a lot of energy is used to make the small components in the AirPods. (Not corresponding to the price difference, of course, but more energy.) Lots more steps in the production chain of AirPods, each with their own energy losses.
So buying new AirPods does have a bigger environmental impact than buying a peanut butter jar.
> you throw away more plastic after a family-sized Chinese takeout meal.
Flying from one side of the country to the other and back uses more carbon than several years' worth of Chinese takeout containers.
Would be interesting to have a breakdown of why the AirPods cost so much. I suspect a large chunk of it is research and development. As well as the wages of the top talent in the world required to develop and manufacture them.
A jar is a mostly once off cost, you build the jar making machine and it works until it breaks. While AirPods are under constant innovation. So the initial cost has to be repaid fast.
If Apple had a donation link, I'd donate an extra $250 to them per pair of AirPods that I've bought. They just work so darn well. Apple is the only reason there's pressure in the industry to make Bluetooth devices that actually work.
Manufacture cost is estimated to be roughly $30. Retail price of no-name, little-margin AirPods knockoffs corroborate this.
I wouldn’t know where to begin with research and engineering, since all their products benefit from audio research and testing, iCloud, device inter-connectivity, etc. AirPods wouldn’t be any good without years of prior work on iOS. But they reportedly assign development costs roughly equal to manufacturing costs, which would put them at $60 and $100 of margin. This would make them contribute more to Apple’s target margin than the average product. This value is possible because of the state of the market, for whatever reason.
> Retail price of no-name, little-margin AirPods knockoffs corroborate this.
I want to push back on that because the no name brands are cost cutting by just repackaging cheap off the shelf bluetooth boards, speakers, and batteries. They do make for a perfecty serviceable pair of earbuds but they aren’t what you should be price comparing to which is other manufacturers making actual comparable products from Sony, Google, Bose, Beats, Samsung which range from $100-300 but mostly hover around $200. Go with a 50% markup from wholesale to retail and you’re looking at probably $100-120 real manufacturing cost.
You’re absolutely right about the difference in quality. The theory is that Apple‘a manufacturing scale gives them a competitive BoM, especially on small hardware that doesn’t require a premium processor or much storage. $100 in manufacturing would be too high as we know from teardowns that more expensive and complicated products like the watch are in that estimated cost range.
Apple also negotiates better margins on wholesale than 50%. They wouldn’t make much money on $170 AirPods otherwise assigning $60-70 research and manufacturing cost, let alone $100.
Yeah but what about the resources that go into making a phone? The phone is just the end result of a long line of processes that create waste. So while the phone may be much smaller in size, "throwing it away" could result in a larger impact to the environment than it may seem.
EPA has done a good job quantifying this with their WARM standards. We think of recycling impact by the ton and recycling a ton of phones is an order of magnitude better than recycling cars, and reusing/refurbishing phones is multiple orders of magnitude better
going on your estimate of 140g, 5 billion phones is 700,000 metric tonnes. that is an insane amount of waste, and not to be sniffed at
besides this, phones are also massively more complex than a glass jar, and much more often replaced than a car or air conditioner
there are genuine malevolent economic factors at play here. these companies want you to get a new phone and throw away your old one, so they can extract more wealth from you. and they have admitted to acting in ways that encourage this
No, 700,000 metric tons per year globally is nothing and we aren’t manufacturing 5 billion phones a year so we aren’t throwing that many away per year. We have more waste from TV remote batteries and nobody singles them out.
As to lifespan, in a lifetime I might have say 20 cellphones and 4 cars but that’s nowhere close to being equivalent waste or environmental impact.
it’s not nothing at all. it’s a lot, especially considering the complexity of the materials used. what’s in a battery? 3 or 4 different materials that we’re well set up to recycle?
this isn’t the issue of where to dispose these phones, it’s the issue of where the materials are coming from in the first place, and how allowing unfettered market forces to roam free (the most blatant illustration being planned obsolescence) creates huge externalities, nicely encapsulated by the example of 5 billion phones being thrown out in a year
they’re still significantly less complex and far more uniform than phones. this added to the fact that they’ve also been around longer means we’re much better set up to recycle them
Phones are vastly more likely to actually be recycled than AA batteries which mostly just get thrown away.
The ideal model is actually car lead acid batteries which have very close to 100% recycling rate in the US. Granted people more often lose their phones than their cars but it still shows what’s possible.
Doesn't it require like half a ton of material to produce one modern phone? (Including all the mining and manufacturing to get one from the earth to ones hand.)
If so then 2.5 billion tons is worth some attention, in addition to other ecological challenges.
But quick googling reveals an iPhone contains 0.034 g of gold. Another stat says one ounce of gold requires 100,000 oz of ore, so the 0.034 g of gold would require 3.4 kg of ore. Nowhere even remotely close to half a ton. I can't find similar stats for e.g. palladium ore used to extract palladium, but remember that the amounts of precious metals in phones are truly tiny.
The news reports I'm finding about "cell phones" and "tons" refer to water -- one report says 13 tons of water per phone. While a pair of leather boots is 25 tons of water, for comparison. But water is recyclable, and it doesn't seem like a concern particularly specific to electronics.
"Tons of water" is also a pretty pointless metric used only because it sounds bad if you don't engage a crucial thought process. Tons of what kind of water (raw river water for cooling, or drinking water), and where (River, sea, lakes, aquifer, renewing source or not) and what happens to it (returned to the source, contaminated, evaporated, etc).
Some places have so much water that they just let it run into the sea.
Almost no water is "lost", except when growing food, when a small percentage of the water used is shipped away within the food.
I looked up “tv remote”. Apparently in the old days the tablet you used to watch videos was in some kind of large box with a glass screen, and the “TV remote” was the user interface for that box. Or something. Still trying to envision all of this ;)
Except that the benefits (ie. 5 billion of whatever not being produced/thrown away) is only one side of the equation. The cost needs to be factored in as well, because fixing the problem of 5 billion phones isn't as easy as snapping your fingers. Just focusing on one side without considering the other makes for poor policy.
And if you are taking that 5B number as a given, then we will be completely out of phones in 3-5 years. That number is much larger than the number of phones produced in a year. It seems like the number taken from an arbitrary estimate scaled without reference to anything else.
It's just that my car has given me 15 years of service and will, I expect, give me ten more. Many large household appliances can last even longer than that. Meanwhile, my phone is only two years old, looks and works perfectly fine, but no longer receives security updates.
I just posted an "Ask HN" on Thursday about how to handle this, because it feels ridiculous to replace the phone at this point, but the alternative options seem to suck too. It just seems like there's so much room to improve the situation.
You're right about the economics, though. I remember filling out a form on the Best Buy website to see what they'd pay me to recycle a three year-old laptop, and it quoted me $5... So clearly whatever can be recycled from these machines isn't all that valuable.
What you're describing is called economism and is the reason we're in this mess. Preservation of the environment can not be reduced to an economic calculation.
To me this seems to be a case of whataboutism. Just because there are worse things to do environmentally speaking does not mean that this is not a problem.
Actually, from an economic perspective, you should tackle the lowest hanging fruit. Assuming we can only tackle a non-unlimited amount of issues at any given time.
I'm assuming this article hits the dopamine because everyone has a phone, and it's a very personal item and everyone upgrades / replaces them eventually. A window A/C on the other hand, not so much.
Usually I don’t like this argument because it shifts the discussion from something you can control to something you can’t which justifies doing nothing.
But in this case, talking about the difference between multiple consumer goods makes sense because you are in control of all of them.
Simply not buying an oversized car does more than a lifetime of using phones for longer.
What you are stating implies that environmental responsibility is non existent and that everybody is entitled to consume all the resources his/their money can afford.
it may well be racist or more likely overly western-centric, but it’s mostly just not helpful to talk like that. besides, these issues aren’t solved by well-meaning volunteers in developing nations, they’re solved by government action on a macro scale
> if you think there should be less crime and a better police force, you don’t go and fight crime on the streets, do you?
Because I don't feel like beating up minorities like Batman does.
But hey, a comic book understanding of the world is precisely what's required to think that we could solve environmental problems by recycling. Which is why industry invented it in the first place.
I don’t mean this to be facetious, but they pointed out that this is whataboutism, and you, in more or less words, disagreed and said ‘what about this other e-waste that should be dealt with?’
besides this, how many people do you know that don’t have a phone? how often on average do you think people replace their phones?
compare those answers to other tech/machinery that you may be thinking of starting with.
also, finally, the top-level comment here takes a really shallow view of how the world economy works. yes if there was a shortage of these materials, there would be an economic incentive to recycle them properly, but that doesn’t mean that the obtaining of these materials doesn’t have a huge human or environmental cost. just because you can get a material cheaply doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with doing it
Sure, but not everyone has the same opportunities. So I'd say we should focus on the best we _can_ do personally.
It's better for me to focus on recycling my electronics than focusing on the ecological impact of the modern commercial satellites madness. Because I cannot do anything about Starlink and the likes, but I can recycle my phone.
Recycling and buying renewed or refurbished phones is good, but the fact that many phones are unsupported after three or sometimes even two years is a problem.
Qualcomm has been a big culprit in this for many years now. They refuse to support their chipsets for too long, because they can reduce expenses not having to maintain them, and more importantly they make more money selling more chipsets to manufacturers.
Yeah Qualcomm has literally become a global environmental and sustainability scourge and it has honestly been a factor in switching away from their products as much as is possible given their modem monopoly. The competition isn’t much better but it IS better.
The thing is I can make that choice but for many people the cellphones they can afford are mediatek and Qualcomm. This lack of support doesn’t truly save money it just cost shifts from a wealthy corporation to the global poor.
there ought to be a law where if hardware is bound to software, and the software goes out of support in a way that renders the hardware useless, then it must be open sourced.
notably post qualcomm pixel phones from google have five years of guaranteed updates. (pixel 6 and above)
apple seems to also do a good job of keeping up software updates for many years. (8+ for some iphones iirc)
I would even be happy to see required labeling for how long a product will be supported for. Just like we have energy usage guides, mass or volume listed and nutrition labels it should be mandated to label how long a product is supported for. If Cloud services are shut down or security vulnerabilities are unpatched in that timeframe you have to give full refunds/recalls and/or get slapped with significant fines.
It is getting better with companies doing this voluntarily (at least the companies that do an ok job with support) but standardized labeling and required promenance would be invaluable.
> Qualcomm has been a big culprit in this for many years now. They refuse to support their chipsets for too long, because they can reduce expenses not having to maintain them, and more importantly they make more money selling more chipsets to manufacturers.
In the past I've seen that argument a lot when it comes to Google's Pixel phones. But nowadays Google uses their own chips, yet a new Pixel 7 that you buy today will still only get guaranteed major Android version upgrades until 2025.
We need modular phones like the frame.work laptop. This is possible with some limitations, but Apple and others will not make as much money. Battery replacement is a no brainer, but why can't the camera and other components be a module to remove and replace when a new one is released?
I bought a certified refurbished phone recently that works as good as new (with a new battery) but is cheaper than a new phone. Even has a new IMEI. The side effect is it's better for the environment. https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/certified-re-newed-ph...
Part of the problem is the ability to get a new battery for an older device. I was happy with my 4 year old phone, but needed a new battery. The only ones for sale had the same date of manufacture as mine and all the reviews said they were barely better than their old battery. It kills me that something so small and inexpensive as the battery was the reason I had to find a new phone.
Not to get too far off topic, but it sounds like this is going to be an issue with EVs too - I hope not.
At least with EVs there will be enough financial incentive for a 3rd party battery market. For phones it doesn't make sense to perform surgery to replace a battery, but for cars the savings will be worth it.
Yes, especially because that depends far more on the browser than the OS. IMHO just using JS whitelisting and something like an adblocking HOSTS file will already eliminate most of the attack surface.
...and if you use something like Win9x, chances are the majority of malware binaries aren't even runnable either.
There have been tons of vulnerabilities in image and video decoders. Those have been causing massive attack surfaces in the browser, and this also affects people who use ad blockers and JS allowlists.
Best I've found is 'cpu info' on F-Droid, it shows the battery health and other useful hardware stats. I checked on 4 devices (2 year old, 2 year old, 4 year old, 8 year old) and all reported battery health as 'Good', so not super detailed.
There is a massive amount of fraud surrounding unofficial batteries so I certainly wouldn’t put it past them to just reprogram the battery cycle count. It isn’t terribly hard to do.
I've only ever thrown away phones for two reasons:
1. Part of the phone (e.g., the battery, charging port, or screen) stopped working, and getting it repaired either was impossible or cost as much as buying a new phone did.
2. The manufacturer stopped releasing software updates, and due to things like SafetyNet, locked bootloaders, or lack of open-source drivers, nobody else could step up to do so.
If both of those problems went away, I can see myself using the same phone for a decade or more.
I think battery is the major problem. I had a s6 and I wasn't able to replace it battery. And, I had to dump it after only 3 years of purchase. Personally speaking, companies must be forced to provide official battery for at least 5 years.
A public campaign can be created to increase people's involvement such as the Olympics. Both the Tokyo Olympic Medals[1] and to a lesser degree the Rio Olympic Medals were made from recycled electronics.
The interesting part about the Tokyo 2020 Medals was that it was done through a public donation effort. All it took was less than 50,000 tons of junk devices. Now just imagine how many precious medals are wasted according to the article with 74 million tons a year!
back-story-anecdote: during graduate school, this issue rose to the top of "green environmental impacts of computer use" .. in 2007 as part of an invited gathering at Google Mtn View, a speaker stood on the podium in front of about 100 googlers of various stripes, and gave a ten minute presentation on E-Waste, the BAN network, efforts in California to make an electronics recycling system (CRTs were first), disposable flip-phones, persistant heavy metals in the food chain, and a bit more.. the punchline was "this group has a special responsibility" ..
end-result? 2007 credit crisis, Google make more billions, almost fifty percent of small business recyclers in California go broke due to cash flow, and E-Waste volumes doubled, and doubled again. Zero traction, zero commitment, lots of Teslas. Later, Apple made some apparently superficial commitments. This is in the most "green" plus most "tech" center of the USA.
bitterly disappointing that the wealth of the tech industry sat on its hands, because product liability is a third-rail in consumer products of all kinds.. it is not in the news, it is not discussed, and meaningful legislation -- a lot like gambling -- is deeply and quietly dismantled behind closed doors.
Very few bright spots and much more waste, every year, year after year. It is not just recycling, it is a right to re-use, making designs that include user serviceable parts, and enabling some kind of consumer to industry return route.
There are serious problems e-scrap recyclers are looking at, but this is repeating old statistics, and has no clue of what the industry is facing.
A decade ago, it was all about what we would do with CRTs.
Five years ago, it was that the value of circuit boards was dropping and lcd mercury containing materials.
Now, it is what will happen with all these batteries and the percentage of plastics by weight of the pounds handled are going up significantly. CRT glass or mercury capacity is not an issue any more.
Think of this e-waste as a giant wheel made of phones and other electronics: this wheel gets pushed by billions of users, driven by the need to look better than others, and the electricity the wheel produces is the profits that feed the rich, who are driven by greed. Both users and owners are blinded by desires. The by-product of this curious process is waste all over the planet.
for those who might not be aware, recycling rare earth metals from various forms of tech is actually a geopolitical struggle of the west
china has the largest and only deposit of a high number of rare earth metals on the planet within their borders, any kind of political discontention could mean being cut off from this supply. and they're invaluable for multiple layers of modern society.
if you feel this isn't a problem, just remember europe didn't feel being reliant on russian gas was a problem either and they're going to be feeling the repercussions this winter
I recently bought a vintage computer (made in late 90s). It's cool but useless today. I always think about that with regard to e waste like "it could be used" but no not really. Maybe you could power a bunch of them/distributed compute but is it worth it. "Give them to a poor country" like they want your old tech?
Idk I think about minimalism eg. have only one computer vs. a few that each get used a few times. But that's the beauty of having the ability to buy things too.
I wonder how many phones are thrown out because of software that seems to get more and more resource hungry because they’re developed by people who don’t realize the cost of every library they import.
Think about it, from a normal usage perspective, the iPhone gotten a LOT faster, but apart from camera improvements is the mail app really better? Or Messages? Facebook? No. In fact a lot of apps just have gotten slower.
Not to mention the slowness because of all the timeout my iPhone hits because I use Pi-hole.
I have five smartphones in my drawer, all in perfect condition except for a battery that won't hold more than two to three hours.
I wish I could at least buy battery replacements and change it easily.
The other problem is the selling cost: whoever I will sell the smartphone to will very likely not keep it and sell it right away to someone else in need, at a higher cost. I may be alone on this but that disturbs me to the highest level and I end up keeping them in my drawers.
I have my old phones in box. I will try fix them when I find same devices elsewhere.
Also... There are no motivation to bring old phones somewhere for recycling. At least in my country only one motivation was to bring old phone to store for having ridiculous sale for new one. That is, for me, still consumerism over recycling.
It's such a shame that there isn't a larger community around reusing/recycling these old phones. Most of the recentish phones contain hardware that performs far better than e.g a Rasberry Pi (plus a screen, camera and built-in UPS) and they are far easier to find than a Rasberry Pi.
With a bit of tinkering one can run a "full" Linux distribution on Android phones (although hardware acceleration is a bit wonky and definitely not plug and play) and due to the size, Wifi, 3G/4G and battery they make excellent little servers. I have an older phone running as an ARM server with a 10 buck/month sim-card with unlimited data. Unless my house burns down or it crashes it should get a fairly good uptime. Getting a dedicated server with UPS and a 4G modem would be far more expensive and worse for the environment!
Here's some links to help you get started (from my personal notes):
- [GitHub - RandomCoderOrg/ubuntu-on-android: Run Ubuntu with pre-installed Desktop Environments in android/termux with ease! Everything is preinstalled so just download install and done](https://github.com/RandomCoderOrg/ubuntu-on-android)
It's also very easy to hookup a Bluetooth controller + [cheap dock](https://aliexpress.com/item/1005003527044516.html?algo_exp_i...) (not supported on all models but Samsung, Motorola and Huawei do usually have pretty good support) and use them for emulation purposes as well.
How capable? An Samsung Galaxy S9 (from 2019) will be able to emulate the following systems:
- Gamecube (up-scaling in light games)
- PS2 (fractional (e.g 1.5x) up-scaling in light/medium games)
- PSP (up-scaling in most games)
- Dreamcast (up-scaling in most games)
- PSX (up-scaling in all games)
- N64 (up-scaling in all games)
IMHO a far better solution (both from a cost and environmental perspective) than a Playstation or SNES Mini console.
Added bonus is the lower power consumption that it's very easy to take with you if you're travelling :)
Unfortunately the amount of recoverable material from a phone is negligible. It’s very difficult to recycle phones because first you have to remove the battery.
Is it? The process for recycling batteries is to shred them and then perform "industrial process" to separate out the useful stuff, basically like refining raw ore all over again.
The phone, outside the battery, might contain a little bit of plastic and metal, and some glass. Seems the battery is the bulk of what one would want to recycle.
You absolutely cannot shred a lithium battery. It will explode. Any type of lithium battery and electronic makes it more expensive to recycle. They must remove that battery first. It would be super simple if we could just throw everything into a shredder, but lithium batteries are different.
This is like the moronic replacement of plastic straws in Ontario.
The paper straws work for many drinks but for some, like Iced Capps, they disintegrate half way through the beverage.
The frustration is that they’re making life stupider in order to harness a drop in the bucket of change. Go clean up the fishing industry’s colossal waste first.
When I lived in Northern California, I used to volunteer for beach cleanup every few weekends. Over a couple of hours, I would personally pick up 5-20 pounds of trash along the beach. The most numerous types of trash were: hundreds of candy wrappers, dozens of cigarette butts, and dozens and dozens of plastic straws. Most of the straws were from fast food restaurants, but a lot were from people eating food at the beach then throwing away the straws. It's kinda disgusting.
The next time you visit a beach in Northern California and gaze at the powerful waves of the Pacific crashing into the clean, sandy beach, realize that it's an illusion. The beach is basically a garage dump. It only looks pristine because dozens of volunteers pick up hundreds of plastic straws from the beach, every weekend.
Sure they soften a bit, but I've never had significant issues with cardboard straws. Plastic straws are awful in terms of trash, and disposable plastic bags need to go away too.
generally the idea is to do tiny things that people hate so they a) feel like something is being done and b) don't actually impact industry or make people want to do more to impact industry
that's because we're not allowed to actually impede wealth accumulation
It's kinda genius because then when the regulations are proposed that would actually make an impact in the industry, the company leaders can be like "see? This is just virtue signalling like those awful paper straws! And we'll have to pass the costs on to you, our customers! You don't want that, right?"
I need straws for many cases, but honestly I agree. I rarely see people do what I do which is take the lid off and just drink it like you’re at a restaurant. There’s something about it that makes most beverages nicer.
Straws exist for car users convenience mostly. The other main case is thick drinks like smoothies and thick shakes. Which ironically are the only drinks that paper straws don’t work for.
I think you're specifically referring to plastic waste in the ocean. This number is not at all accurate in terms of total plastic waste (including landfills, etc.).
