The environmental impact of technology devices is getting worse | Hacker News Reader

The environmental impact of technology devices is getting worse

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52 pointssigna1165 comments

Seems like the easiest fix would be to mandate the same charging cable for all phones (no dongles) and user replaceable batteries that require no tools to change.

With those two simple tweaks it would be much easier to keep a phone for 3 or more years. My google pixel seems like it could easily last for many years with it's quad core, 128GB storage, 4GB ram, and 2560x1440 display. Lets be honest, for most uses that's plenty for many years to come.

But already the battery is not as good as it was new and it's only going to get worse.

Chinese smartphone sales have dropped dramatically this year. Mostly as smartphones have reached a point where upgrading cost vs return is no longer worth it for many. I really wanted Googles modular phone to be a successful but it died very quickly even before release otherwise that would have been a great way to upgrade parts without disposing old phones and creating waste.

If you think that's a shame, do check out Fairphone [0]. It's not completely modular, but it's trivial to replace the battery, screen and camera's without tools. See also their spare parts shop [1], all of which you can replace by yourself.

[0] https://www.fairphone.com [1] https://shop.fairphone.com/en/spare-parts/?ref=header

The Fairphone is a great idea, however, the software support plan, which is crucial for a long-term device, is vague [⁰].

I wonder if there is a realistic plan for such devices; I'm not sure a subscription plan would work - would non-technically minded people pay?

[⁰] https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/205504175-Wh...

Coincidentally they just made some announcements on that [0].

> Right now, we’re hard at work to get Android 7.1 “Nougat” into the hands of existing and new Fairphone 2 users this summer.

Unfortunately:

> Now, you may be wondering, “why not Android 8, ‘Oreo’?”. Android 8 and 9 are entirely new levels of complexity from Android 7, far more different than 7 was to 6. Therefore, attempting the upgrade to 7 was the best option.

[0] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2018/05/08/keeping-your-phone-l...

Do you think Google bought it only to kill it (the modular phone startup)?

Ah no google is not into selling phones as much as getting people to use its services. I don't think they bought it for nefarious reasons but simply ended it as they were unlikely to get traction for it. All the phone manufacturers and telco would have have opposed it anyway as it would have destroyed trillion dollars of their market cap.

Also mandate upgradable software. I feel that outdated software becomes an issue way before dead batteries for most phones on the market. Most vendors don't seem to care much about software upgrades, especially on the lower end, and not all devices are supported by LineageOS / postmarketOS and co. I'm not even talking about (ok, technically, I am) how hard and scary it is to install alternative firmware on smartphones: unsupported rooting process that can brick your device, loss of your data while rooting, unsigned binaries distributed by unknown third-parties, broken warranty by using unsupported firmware… Vendors should be forced to sell either hardware that can be used with third-party software, or harware and software that is guaranteed to be updated for more than “up until the next shinny new device is out”.

This is a huge problem. Every single one of my iDevices outlasted their software updates. Yet, I can still install Linux on a 20 year old computer and it runs fine.

To be fair the android rooting community is usually transperent. It's perspective of "scary" shouldnt be compared to jail breaking an iphone to get free apps. Also, most tutorial for rooting or just flashing firmware it's alwqys adviced to backup data, so fear of loss should be manegable.... one more thing, if you've reached the point of needing to root/change device software, do you really believe the company cares about your warrenty. I've known people with apple care go get their 5 year old mac books for battery replacement, to then get their time wasted with a lazy response of "sorry we don't covery water damage". When for a fact that device never experienced it.

If you want to get software updates (and you /do/ want it, even if you don't know, because of critical security fixes), you reach the point of needing to change the device software in only a few years (see, even Google's own Nexus line has a laughable software support duration: https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705#nexus_device...). In the lower end, it frequently happens before the end of the legal warranty in some countries (eg. 2 years in France), especially with discontinued devices sold during sales. Worse, there's a frightening number of phones sold on Amazon that run an /already/ unsupported version of Android with known security issues.

Then, when you have the chance to have a device supported by some third party, you discover that you can't do backups without having to appeal to some wizardry with ADB and your phone in “developer mode” (when you even have that option), because you can't otherwise do proper backups without having rooted your phone /before/ having data to back up in the first place (ie. thus voiding your warranty from day one).

> Seems like the easiest fix would be to mandate the same charging cable for all phones (no dongles) and user replaceable batteries that require no tools to change.

Never gonna happen, because Apple would make less money then. Why should they allow such a law to be passed?

The EU already has previously published an initiative, which was voluntary but which many phone manufacturers did end up getting on board with, regarding using micro USB connectors for charging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply

I think that with USB power delivery and USB type C connectors, we could see a similar move again (or an update?) from the EU or another larger government (China?).

Getting user replaceable batteries, or at least more phones with this option even if it's not mandated by regulation, may come about from some of the "right to repair" legislation which is starting to take shape in the USA. I'm sure the EU has a similar (existing?) set of regulations in the works. I can't see a mandate of everyone having to use the same exact battery or tool-less requirements but I could see a mandate happening that a battery has to be able to be replaceable by a 3rd party service center and the OEM must sell battery replacement kits and instructions for a reasonable cost to 3rd parties for X years after a phone goes on the market. This wouldn't kill Apple, Apple is already replacing iPhone batteries with Apple provided parts using Apple technicians for only $29 in 2018: https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power

Pixel phones are end of life already. They were only guaranteed android updates for two years after 2016. This is another problem we have to overcome.

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en

I have a 6p. It works great after a battery replacement, but Android P wont run on it.

> They were only guaranteed android updates for two years after 2016

Not exactly. The 2 years is for OS upgrades. They will continue to receive security updates which, IMHO are way more important, for another year. A 3 year lifecycle is still not great though.

Pixel was released in October 2016, so it hasn't been 2 years yet.

I thought it was two years since the LAST one was sold, not the first.

I think user-replaceable batteries are designed for shorter life.

- Sent on my iPhone 6 (almost 4 years old); 95% battery health.

The math is pretty poor in this article. Information and Communication Tech represents only 3% of global carbon emissions, and most of that is from giant server farms.

This other article states that the embodied CO2 in a cellphone is roughly equivalent to 1kg of beef. That's like three steaks.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...

The bigger emissions problems around electricity generation and transportation are where we should be focusing our attention.

We should bless our lucky stars the headline isn't "Apple Phones Are Killing The Planet...".

A decent proportion of those server farms exist to meet demand from smartphone users and serve their ecosystems.

But manufacturing a smartphone involves a lot of transportation and electricity, doesn't it?

Our focus should also be on cutting energy spendings & reducing transportation, and stop buying new phones (and laptops and tvs etc..) every now and then sure will help, will it not?

Or we could reduce meat consumption.

I suspect its long past the day when a marginal change in consumption will actually affect the world, even a little. The production of meat (and phones) does not change at all for small adjustments in demand - they are far too large an industry with far too large a lead time to respond to much at all.

In fact, using homebrew solutions or alternative sources actually increases my environmental footprint. Now I'm not only wasting the goods that were created in preparation for me (phone, meat etc), I'm consuming more goods from an alternative source that is small and can more readily adjust for demand, which it does, by providing for me. Which has a further non-zero environmental impact.

So in the short turn (year over year) its actually best to consume only the mainstream sources of goods since their marginal cost is about zero. Whether that seems tragic or efficient is up to the reader.

The market is not insensitive to consumer demand. Your choices don't make a significant impact, but the aggregate choices of all consumers is hugely significant. If we buy less meat and lobby for a reduction in agricultural subsidies, the inevitable result is a reduction in meat production, either through a direct response from producers or through the bankruptcy of less efficient producers.

How's that going for us so far? Its a hard sell, convincing people to change their behavior now (pointlessly; in fact to the detriment of the ecology short-term) for some theoretical good later.

The Ford F-150 is the biggest selling vehicle in the US. Ford haven't even tried to sell it in Europe, because there's no demand. They do sell the Ka, a model even smaller than the Fiesta that isn't available in the US.

Ten years ago, the market for grass-fed beef and organic vegetables was negligible. Consumer demand induced the agricultural industry to start shifting towards production techniques with a lower environmental impact.

Consumer demand matters.

You changing your diet will not have that big of an impact, you're right. Just like your vote won't sway an election. In aggregate, these things matter. In the U.S., over 9% [1] of the population follows a vegetarian/vegan diet. That absolutely has an impact on how much beef/chicken/pork is produced.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Unite...

Not in the short term - again, the lead time of beef is years. And so on.

Lead time for climate change has been years too. Unfortunately almost nobody cared.

That presumably includes the transportation and electricity (probably not transportation to the point of sale after manufacture, but that emits even less CO2 according to the article). Remember, we're talking about small, light, high-value goods; transportation isn't going to be a big problem here, compared to say 1kg of beef.

The greatest myth in sustainable energy policy is "every little helps". We get caught up on visible but irrelevant things, while ignoring massive systemic problems.

Apple publish high-quality, audited environmental impact reports for all their products. A 64gb iPhone 8 produces the equivalent of 57kg of CO2 across the entire product lifespan, from manufacturing to recycling.

A return flight from LAX to JFK produces ~580kg of CO2; the climate impact is equivalent to ~1100kg of CO2, because emissions at altitude have a greater warming effect.

Driving 10,000 miles in a typical sedan or crossover SUV emits about 3000kg of CO2; in a large pickup like a Ford F150, that figure is closer to 4500kg.

The food consumption of the average US household results in equivalent CO2 emissions of 8100kg.

Our carbon emissions are dominated by heating and cooling, transport and food. Keeping your phone for another couple of years is a rounding error in the scheme of things - it's equivalent to a two-hour car journey or a good restaurant meal. If we are to stand any chance of limiting the impact of climate change, we need to make big, difficult choices about our lifestyle.

We need to massively reduce the amount we drive and fly. We need to redesign homes to require less active heating and cooling. We need far more sustainable electricity generation. We need to radically alter our diets and our approach to agriculture, with far less meat and dairy consumption. This will be difficult, expensive and politically unpopular, but it's the only way we'll make a meaningful impact.

https://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPh...

https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3

http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet

https://www.withouthotair.com/

I understand what you say, and I agree for the most part, but it really seems impossible that a two-hour car journey emits more than manufacturing a smartphone...

I mean, building a smartphone involves digging for raw materials, extract them, transport them, assemble them, etc. And i'm not counting the emission during the design process.

I know that a two-hour car journey is really not optimized, and that manufacturing phones on a large scale is very optimized, but it seems impossible to me that manufacturing a phone in China from components from all over the world emits less that a good big steak in a restaurant... I that's true, that's incredible.

Imagine if you bought gasoline at the grocery store in two-liter bottles. You'd need to buy 31 bottles to fill the tank on a Ford Fusion. Think about what 31 bottles of soda would look like in a shopping cart. Think about the sheer effort of filling your cart with 31 bottles, pushing it to the parking lot and pouring the contents into your gas tank.

Someone had to build a giant platform in the ocean, drill a hole deep into the ground, pump the oil out of the ground and move it ashore, boil it in a giant distiller to extract the gasoline, pump it into a tanker and drive it to your gas station. All of that stuff is invisible, but you notice the gram of polythene wrapping on a cucumber.

A phone is an incredibly sophisticated device, but it's only a few ounces of stuff. It cost you $700, so it feels like it should involve a huge amount of natural resources to make. It required a lot of human skill and ingenuity, but we didn't need to burn a lot of stuff to make it. When you fill up your tank with $50 of unleaded, you don't think about the huge volume of pure hydrocarbons you're pouring into your car or the immensely energy-intensive processes needed to extract, refine and transport that fuel.

When you get on a plane, you don't think about the fact that almost the entire volume of the wings are filled with fuel that'll be burned in a single journey. When your heating thermostat clicks on, you don't think about the volume of gas rushing through a network of pipes to feed your boiler.

Like most problems, the 'solution' to reducing CO2 emmissions is made up of a bunch of smaller changes, and will not be one large 'fix'. I see no harm in chipping away at even the smallest of gains, provided we continue/push changes at all levels. Even 57kg * millions of devices over 18 months (average lifetime of a phone) is still a substantial amount of CO2 being released, even if it is dwarfed by other sources.

Substantial? Not really compared to truck transport or even cars. Or especially not when compared to electricity generation.

Two cans of soda take more energy to make. (Because metals are extremely energy intensive to refine and recycle.)

The main environmental killers are still means of transport. A car is a ton of metal... Housing also demands plenty of energy in materials.

Smartphones are manufactured in a small area of Asia well stocked with all kinds of electronics, bought in bulk.

They're sent to other countries by ship, also in bulk. Efficient but slow.

Even the last mile transport does not look bad there.

The main rare material in phones is actually lithium and that has some indirect impact - we could use it in cheaper batteries for solar and wind instead.

Exactly. The amount of energy spent on heating and cooling is huge. Then it's transportation and agriculture. Then somewhere far behind is the whole Internet and efficient electronic devices.

I use the same argument when it comes to bitcoin. That stuff is so tiny in our profiler. Sane thing to do is to optimize the slowest functions.

> efficient electronic devices

When hardware has a two year average life cycle, the environment is not benefiting from any of the hardware's efficient characteristics. You seem happy with your new phone though, I guess that's the main thing.

I'm using xperia mini st15i, personally optimized ROM. Yet still, no industry comes no where close to heating and cooling.

Let's optimize the slowest functions not tiny percentages.

I wish I could use my phones longer than I already do. Unfortunately, the lack of software updates for older hardware turns that into a security risk as even critical issues are no longer getting fixed.

Likewise, the 'modern' web breaks things left and right. The heavy use of JavaScript for trackers etc makes it impossible to read even simple news web sites on an old iPad, even though the actual content is just static text. With Discourse and similar platforms gaining popularity, I'm getting locked out from more parts of the web unless I have up to date hardware. I don't understand why web forums became such complex beasts that a device capable of streaming video, realtime sound synthesis and 3D gaming is not sufficient to display what is essentially just text and some images.

HN is a positive exception, I sincerely hope it remains that way.

I think you're safe, HN is too hip to change.

Where is the disconnect I wonder? Your old iPad I am sure runs software that is many more times more complex, more lines of code, and more intense than the ad tracking software on a browser. Will web assembly help here?

Unless Apple surprises us with an iOS 5 update that includes a browser with web assembly - no, it won't help.

Either way, simply going to spiegel.de crashes (!) Safari in a 1st gen iPad. The Washington Post web page also would constantly get reloaded in my iPhone 4S.

Sounds like it may be due to Safari purposefully limiting the memory and processing resources available to a browser tab, no?

My question is: Do we need to surf the web that much? Do we really need an iPad that much in the first place?

Two things not mentioned:

1. OS support (android at least) isn't that long. I suppose security patches are more important and might be worth fighting for somehow (extended security patch plans?).

2. i sometimes hear how repair shops have a hard time sourcing oem parts (having to go to chinese frankenparts which may be confiscated at the border). this should not be an issue and should work just like the car industry.

I would love to be able to just buy a new phone battery and keep mw phone going longer. But I do not want to have to go through a complex taking apart process that may result in destroying it.

Plenty of manufacturers offer battery upgrade programmes, the one form Apple is even reasonably affordable these days. Plus there are third party upgraders that will do it for you for popular models. You do need to bear this requirement in mind when buying though.

Phone manufacturers should be forced to provide free battery replacement on all their phones. Otherwise they should make it a simple process for consumers to swap the battery out.

I still have a Samsung S5 phone with removable battery, had it for years. I don't know if there's phones on the market with replaceable batteries, I have not bothered looking for a new phone.

I wonder to what extent modern electronics, particularly display technologies as mentioned in the article, are dependent by necessity on rare earth metals, and couldn't be replaced with other chemicals.

A change I can imagine in the future is towards organic chemicals such as in OLED displays. Although I'm aware that many of those used today are organometalics, and I have no idea what the actual metal resource impact is.

Maybe a refund for consumers plus a collection fee for institutions would be an incentive to recycle, for both individuals and businesses. Your phone breaks, you take it to the supermarket, they give you $10, they send in the IMEI or some other unique code and get $12 in return.

Recycling just isn't a substitute; it's far less effective. You're supposed to reduce, reuse, and then, if neither is possible, recycle... in that order.

Recycling a phone can mean reusing many of its components for repairing other phones (as part of the fourth R: refurbishing).

In reality recycling a phone means shipping it to some poor country where it is burned in an open fire to recover some of the metals.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-...

From your link: "85 percent of the e-waste dumped in Ghana and other parts of West Africa is produced in Ghana and West Africa. (...) In other words, Agbogbloshie is not a global dumping ground. Like most places on Earth, it’s struggling to deal with what it generates on its own."

Do you know of any place I could recycle an old phone that would give some kind of assurance (even a pinkie promise... but preferably some kind of statistic) that this would actually happen? Would love some recommendations because I don't know of any.

I'm not from the US, but ecoATM claims they refurbish most and recycle responsibly the rest: https://www.ecoatm.com

Wow thanks, I'll check it out!!

What good is a refurbished but old iPhone these days when there is no more software for it? Even when you're lucky enough to have backup copies of older software versions, the web APIs most rely on have been discontinued.

I don't know about the iPhone, but I'm still using a Nexus 7 from 2012 just fine. It runs Lollipop (released in 2014) and in my experience, most apps support it just fine, although I'm sure their developers hate me :)

the planet != the environment.

the planet will survive, it will just suffocate us and some other life will take over.

Luckily everybody reading this article will still understand that the article is being alarming about the effect on us as a species and not about the actual existence of the planet on its own.

it's just a euphemism for our own existence.

You know, that doesn't really make me feel any better or make the crisis any less pressing.

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