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Still, an average of one brand new phone per person every 18 months seems very high.

Don't forget that includes almost a billion children under the age of 8 who typically get hand-me-downs phones from their parents. And people in 3rd world countries. And old people.

Not too ironic considering many are too young to have phones, or too poor to have them.

Fair.

I'm gonna support your point. I'm not buying that 3x more phones were trashed as sold.

New cell phone sales are under 2B/year. Industry hoped they would continue rising after 2016, but they've plateaued around 1.8B. Of those about 200M are still flip/dumb phones. Ownership time (in the pipeline) is increasing not falling.

I don't believe 5.3B became waste unless many B people suddenly decided to do without (in 2022). That seems unlikely unless it just some random definition of watste. Sure there might even be (8-9 years of production) 16B phones laying around somewhere outside of landfill so why did they become get trashed in '22? Can we blame 3G?

https://www.sellcell.com/how-many-mobile-phones-are-sold-eac...