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Comment by rjd | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else look at these numbers and instantly think of the shear volume of waste?

With iphones thats a well over million per day. With most people already owning a phone thats a lot of superseded devices to deal with. Thats a lot of chemical waste...

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I think the vast majority of these users are probably on their first smartphone. For example, Android is huge in African countries where families who've never owned a computer are starting to sign up for cheap 3G plans with cheap Android phones.

I bet there's a lot of waste, but I also bet that it's nothing compared to the waste from old American cars driving around and polluting. Think of what these new cheap smartphones mean for humanity - the ability for entire populations to pop on the internet that never have before, read wikipedia, etc. Surely that is worth the waste it is producing.

I wasn't really referring to the 'carbon footprint' if thats why you brought cars into it. I was more referring to things like PCBs and batteries, and the chemical processes used in refining these things. Toxic and harmful chemicals appearing in ecosystems they shouldn't... when things like cell phones don't get reprocessed properly.

There are plenty of toxic chemicals in car manufacturing. Hell, cars (particularly old ones) produce these toxic chemicals continuously while you drive them! Smart phones are a hell of a lot less toxic than cars.

As for the comparative benefits, we could argue until the cows come home - both products are insanely useful and life-changing - but if we simply declared them equally useful, that would make phones a better bargain due to the much smaller amounts of toxicity.

And there are not only environmental effects but social too. IEEE Spectrum has an article this month regarding this. Is a good read.

Cracking Down on Conflict Minerals

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/cracking-d...

The good news is that services like gazelle, Amazon Buyback, eBay Instant Sale and Verizon Trade-in are making it more likely that old phones get sold and kept in use, instead of rotting in a drawer until they're tossed into the household waste.

This is exactly the reason why I keep my mobile as long as possible (years). It is a shame to see all the waste we ship to counties like Ghana and Nigeria and call it recycling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste

I used to upgrade my phone once every ~5 years too. Until iOS/Android phones came out things didn't really change much. Sure they got thinner, bigger/colour screens, higher MP cameras, etc. but the functionality was pretty much SMS/MMS, voice calls/mail, photos/videos and that was it. If you were happy with the camera you had and the size of the screen there was very little reason to upgrade beyond fashion.

Now, however, the smart phone I bought last year is struggling to run the latest applications due to it's low CPU speed, if I didn't know how to install my own ROMs (and most people don't) I would be stuck on Android 2.1 and that means I couldn't run a lot of the newer apps. Newer phones have actual useful features being added like HDMI-out, NFC, better battery technology, etc.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently and it seems like a big concern to me. Ideally, consumer products should last a person for more than a couple of years but with smartphones the product life is about two years.

I wonder how long we can go at this rate until our rare-earth minerals start reaching alarming levels.

There are 4.6 billion mobile phone owners. A million a day isn't a lot.

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