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Comment by pwagland | Hacker News Reader

Per person, it's not. But if you have 3 billion people changing their phones every 3 years, that's a billion phones per year.

Assuming that the average phone weighs 100g, that's 100 million tons of phones per year.

In the aggregate, it adds up a lot.

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1,000,000,000 phones * 0.100 kg = 100,000,000 kg = 100,000 metric tons (tonnes).

I wonder if the decrease in desktop computers, CRT screens, printers, scanners, fax machines, etc. lowered overall e-waste volumes at all. Even though there are so many phones, each one is a lot smaller than personal electronics used to be.

All this assumes that volume is the problem. Deliberately extreme example: cleaning up my yard results in a large volume of heavy waste - enough bags of waste to equal hundreds, maybe thousands, of discarded phones. But surely all the metals in the phones - maybe even from just ONE phone - will have much more environmental impact than a mixture of dead leaves, grass, and old mulch from my yard.

Well, yeah, that's why I mentioned other electronics instead of biodegradables. Is there something especially bad in the raw materials of phones that older bigger electronics didn't have?

For one thing an old desktop computer is almost entirely air by volume... Most of the reason that phones are small is that they've managed to make them without having to have a lot of air inside.

Sure, but every PCB in it is still bigger than a phone. I mean, this isn't some weird hypothetical situation, like we're comparing phones to mysterious cardboard boxes or something. I'm just talking about the actual e-waste that people throw away every year, and wondering how it's changed in the phone era.

I looked into a bit. Seems like no, the overall quantity (by weight) is increasing every year. There is a tiny decrease in big CRT screens, but it's offset by the steady increases in electronics of all sorts in developing countries. Phones and other small devices do make up a smaller portion of the overall weight, but overall it's still going up year after year.

https://ewastemonitor.info/gem-2020/ has a lot of good info.

Is your math wrong by order of magnitudes? I try to visualize the amount of waste I generate every year and try to imagine one cell phone next to it. Doesn’t feel very significant.

The waste is not just the end product but all the waste and environmental impact producing it.

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