If the average person uses them for 2 years they'll be a drop in the ocean to the tens or hundreds of kilos of plastic and other objects they don't recycle fully in that time.
It's not that it's polluting the environment that much, more that it's wasteful and creates a unnecessary demand in IC production when they are thrown away in perfect working order.
> Analysts estimate Apple sold between 14 million and 16 million AirPods in 2017.[38] In 2018, AirPods were Apple's most popular accessory product, with 35 million units sold.[39][40] 60 million units were sold in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPods
In 2020, another 114 million units were sold.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/
Each airpod weights about 4g. But we're counting sales. So, we're counting pairs. And we also have to factor in the plastic charging case which comes in at 38g since that's also included in the package as well. That makes for a grand total of 46g per sale.
By my count, the total weight of all airpods ever sold is about 10.350 metric tonnes (46g * 225 million units).
According to the Ocean Cleanup project, the Great Pacific Garbage Page weighs about 88.000 tonnes.
https://theoceancleanup.com/great-pacific-garbage-patch/ Also seems to be confirmed here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
So, all airpods sold between 2017 and end of 2020 make up about... 11.7% of the Great Pacific Garabage Patch.
That's not a number I'd call "negligible". I'm a bit floored and incredulous and not even all too sure of my number work to the point where I've been re-calculating for the past 20 minutes and I'm arriving at the same numbers again and again.
That's just the amount of waste that will need to be disposed of when all units have reached their end of life.
There's also the production process itself which requires resources and produces waste as well. That's not just the molding of plastics and the assembly of circuits. I'm also talking about the extraction, refining,... of natural resources just to produce the half-finished parts that arrive at the plant where the final product is assembled. There's the logistics and transports involved just to move the entire chain. Oh, and the number juggling above is also discounting packaging and wrapping. There's a massive hidden footprint there as well.
If we choose number of plastic bags consumed in American on an annual basis (100 Billion [1]) and go by the mass per bag (5.5g [2]) then just plastic bags in America is 550K tonnes/year of plastic.
Also, according to the UN the world produces as much as 50 million tonnes of electronic and electrical waste a year and they estimate 20% of it is recycled. [3]
So, ya. A penny saved is a penny earned and all. But it's still a penny.
[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_...
[2] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/plastic-bags-to-recycle-or-...
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/un-repor...
It’s about equivalent to a weeks worth of plastic Starbucks cups every morning and far less than the packaging on a average shopping trip.