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Comment by GijsjanB | Hacker News Reader

You'd be mistaken. That would be a lot of phones and hence a lot of (rare) metals being delved. Sadly, even something as precious as a mobile phone is a throw away product nowadays. I have no solution, it's us, consumers, who are doing this. But please don't pretend it doesn't matter. Maybe, just maybe, if we could innovate on the recycling of our old phones, it would matter less.

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How about you quantify how much of an increase in waste it would be? My prior is that almost all appeals to waste conservation fall apart when you examine them in depth.

Ok, shooting from the waist. Say on average people use their phone 3 years. Say, we could stretch that to 4 years. Roughly 2/3 of the world population owns a phone, that's 5 billion phones. That means we would save 5 billion phones every 12 years, or: more than 400 million phones every year.

I love innovation as much as the next guy/gal, but getting all those products to 7.5 billion people is probably not (yet) sustainable for our planet. What if we could make (in this case mobile phone) producers (partly) responsible for the waste disposal/recycling of their products?

I guess because most of world on the Android phones buy handsets as pre-paid devices, using them until they either die or get stolen, so they aren't actually being replaced every 3 years.

As for security updates, yes it is a bummer, but not much better than what feature phones and Symbian used to offer, which was basically zero updates.

All the Apple stuff I have access to has been paid by my employer.

I am not doing contracts and their price ranges are out of what I deem as acceptable to pay for hardware as private user.

Google informs me that there are 20 to 50 million tons of electronic waste per year. 400 million phones, each phone weighs less than half a pound, so let's say 200 million pounds per year, divide by 2000, that means 100 thousand tons of electronic waste saved.

Less than a percentage point of reduction of purely electronic waste. This is what I mean by "almost all waste claims fall apart when examined."

It's a bit unfair to measure by weight, because mobile phones are light. One television, monitor or desktop computer can weigh more than 10kg, but may not have the same impact on the environment as 10kg/125g = 80 mobile phones. And besides, why stop with mobile phones? We're doing the same with TVs, now they're smart, but 3 year old apps don't work anymore, so: next!

Well, that's why I asked you to quantify things. If you have reason to believe that mobile phones punch above their weight in terms of e-waste, tell me exactly why, and how much. Does that mean that saving 400 million mobile phones per year goes from saving 0.6% of e-waste to 0.8% of e-waste?

And I'm not defending the practice of throwing out TVs or computers or anything else after 2 years, just phones.

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