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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

I'm still daily-driving an iPhone 7, so I sympathize. A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps.

Smartphones cause a truly astonishing amount of waste (https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-...: ~151 million phones discarded in the US each year, as of 2018), to say nothing of the various social follow-on effects that are being argued to death elsewhere. I was a very late smartphone adopter and I'm already trying to reduce the amount I depend on this thing; too much of their marketing always struck me as being more akin to new sneakers than life-improving tech.

As a dev I understand the challenges of supporting older hardware. As a conscious consumer, I wish there were another option available in the market, and I haven't yet decided what I'll do when my current device finally needs to be retired.

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That article is awfully short on estimating environmental impact.

Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total carbon impact is ~175 pounds of CO2, or about 9 gallons of gasoline. Which is roughly 0.25% of emissions from driving a car the average amount for four years.

Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact than doubling the lifetimes of mobile phones.

Of course the tragedy is that we're doing neither.

I would argue that not lowering our car use drastically is a tragedy, and that our phone waste is a rounding error in comparison. And that the second tragedy is that so much media effort is spent focusing the public on rather meaningless phone waste rather than something meaningful like car use.

Does it takes into account all the things that a smartphone replaces, in both usage and hardware?

Let's not define "environmental impact" solely in terms of carbon emissions and then do a trivial comparison to some mundane activity.

Smartphones may have a low carbon emission footprint relative to some other things (numbers I found varied widely) and that still wouldn't be a good argument for discarding them unnecessarily.

Their production and disposal has a great deal of other side effects that aren't defined by carbon emissions, including the mining and refining of rare metals. I would very much like to link a comprehensive examination of this here but I regret that I haven't got one in my bookmarks already and search results are being as useless as usual. If anyone else has a particularly great link to share I'd love to see it too.

You're definitely helping me prove my point, what are those other environmental impacts?

Let's imagine we can stop a single car from needing to be produced: that will dwarf all the mining impacts from probably thousands of phones! Cars are soooo much worse along any angle you can possibly imagine, yet people are misdirected from their use of cars to worrying about miniscuke rounding errors from their phones.

so let's stop unnecessary cars and unnecessary phones

The first step when doing optimization is to measure, so that one knows where efforts have significant results.

I am arguing that our efforts should be in proportion to their payoff for environmental efforts as well.

Or more precisely, we should spend our environmental efforts in ways that maximize their returns.

Thus, here I am spending lots of time commenting on how a tiny minor change in driving habits will have bigger effects than large changes in phone habits.

Urban planning in the US responds to the demands of the residents. We should be asking all residents demand alternatives to driving.

Urban planning in the US was a result of the oil lobby. It has nothing to do with the demands of residents except insofar as they were also brainwashed by the oil lobby.

It can't be limited to just the oil lobby, it was a general movement with lots of different proponents, not the least the car companies! In fact the car companies quite a bit more. But the urban planning establishment definitely adopted car-only infrastructure with gusto, without any direct oil or car money behind it.

Suppose (made up scenario) we can stop a million phones being discarded every week by mandating that camera modules have to be replaceable by third-parties.

We can drop that legislation tomorrow, basically no problem.

Are you gonna say, no we have to wait and do cars first because a car is equal in carbon to 20 phones (or whatever).

Cars are one of the large container targets, but it takes years to change urban environments, to build transportation infrastructure, to change building zones, etc., to prepare the way for people using alternative transport (or none). Unless you can win over your citizens (and politicians who are in lobbies pockets) for a grand plan like 'no more new cars from now on'.

That cars are such a slow mover is the reason that we need to focus on it now, rather than later.

I don't think you hypothetical would change even a tiny fraction of phone replacements, but even if it did, legislative bandwidth in the US is extremely low and should be reserved for the high impact changes. Anything that distracts from the must-do messages is quite likely to be harmful.

We make people jump through all sorts of hoops for plastic straws and plastic bags that have approximately zero environmental win compared to far smaller changes to their car use.

The real problem is the social attitude that cars can not be touched or criticized. That needs to start changing.

Our phones are not the core of climate change, our cars and all the massive environmental damage from mining the necessary minerals for them really are.

Those rare metals are not gone, they are inside the discarded phones to be mined again.

Why is carbon emissions a suitable measurement of the environmental impact of electronic waste?

I am using it because it's the only impact that I see measured anywhere on electronic waste, and I have spent a fair amount of time trying to figure it out on my own.

If you have a better quantification of species lost, of ecological diversity lost, of land lost, I would absolutely love to hear it, but I have not found anything better despite my research!

Also, the environmental and ecological damage that we are facing from global warming is so utterly massive in comparison to all other ecological damage that we do, that any other avoided damage needs to be placed in the context of halting global warming. Humans will survive climate change, and a lot of other species will survive too, but the dieoff of species from it is so shocking that focusing on the small amounts of mining for phones in comparison to the massive amounts of mining and e-waste from cars seems, well, at best misguided. And if I'm being more honest, I think it's actually quite harmful to environmental action to focus any attention on phones when action on cars is so much more impactful.

"The use phase of a smartphone is not the most significant in the life cycle, in terms of [greenhouse gas] emissions", https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0909-4 , from 10 years ago.

From https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Coolproducts-repo... (2019):

"Our analysis shows that a 1-year lifetime extension of all smartphones in the EU would save 2.1 Mt CO2 per year by 2030, the equivalent of taking over a million cars off the roads. A lifetime extension of 3 years would save around 4.3 MtCO2. And a 5-year extension would correspond to about 5.5 MtCO2."

The extra global warming contributions come from "manufacturing, transportation and end-of-life phases", and the increasing dependency on remote servers.

Exactly, it's the production of the phones where most of the carbon is generated.

As for the comparisons there, it's hard to make head or tails of the meaning, because the "context" provided is apples to oranges. A million cars versus how many phones? Or a million cars versus how many cars in Europe? Citing a big number does not mean much unless we have something to compare that big number to, and I question the intentions of such "bald big numbers" because I see it so often used to muddy the waters and confuse people on many topics. For example, nuclear advocates will often disparage solar, talking about X million square kilometers without giving any context on whether that's actually a big number or not.

2.1Mt CO2 (over how many years with that "by 2030") versus how many Gt Co2 per year? Seems to be 2.5-3.1Gt/year based on a web search..

And what percentage of total EU emissions are from cars?

These numbers also make the argument that phones are a small rounding error compared to other much bigger actions.

Should we mandate repairability? Of course! It's good! But getting bent out of shape on the impact of phones compared to far more common and wasteful practices is a bad use of our limited amount of time to make drastic action.

And the EU is far better on cars than the US, so perhaps it makes more sense for them to take action on phones, but in the US, our car addiction makes for far better and practical environmental action.

> Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact than doubling the lifetimes of mobile phones.

Urban planning too obviously cannot be pinned on consumer choices. Which is why it would never become the locus of attention.

I don’t know if you are right or wrong about this point. But nonetheless.

> cannot be pinned on consumer choices. Which is why it would never become the locus of attention.

Can you explain your reasoning here? I think you are saying that we focus all of our environmental action through the lens of consumer choice, which is something that I also think is true.

We can encourage the public to make better individual choices, but a far better approach is to change the system so that the default choice is the best choice.

But when it comes to phones, a lot of the policy action seems to be set on forcing companies to behave in a certain way, which IMHO is perfectly cromulent if the environmental payoff is proprotionate to the effort.

My focus has been on changing the attitudes towards policy changes that broaden the choices of individuals, to allow them to even choose a better path that is not currently available, because urban planning has banned walkable neighborhoods in nearly every part of every city.

There are a lot of carbon emissions from a variety of sources. Coal fired power generates more CO2 in the US than all US automobiles combined. Does that mean we should completely ignore automobiles and focus on coal power?

Focusing on the "smallest" problem at the expense of the "biggest" is the wrong approach. But ignoring small problems that are easier to fix is also the wrong approach. The author is using a phone that is more than 6 years old and still functions; making it easier to continue using it feels like an easier problem than changing urban planning.

Coal is a dead man walking, not just in the US, but around the world. Systematic market forces have eliminated any financial advantage to coal. China uses it to fill in for gaps in renewables, but has very low capacity factors for their plants.

IMHO we should spend lobbying efforts on the things that will have greater effects, like approving apartment buildings in walkable areas.

I agree with your assessment that we should change what we can and should optimize how we spend our time creating change, but IMHO the best possible outcome of advocating for phone change is that people think "hey yeah let's change this," but then get told "oh so you are OK with that change, how about something far far bigger for small effort?"

We seriously only need to do very small changes to urban planning to effect massive change compared to phones. And those small changes have the effect of growing. And they are necessary urban planning changes, and the longer we put them off the less likely we can have the snowball rolling where we need it to be.

> A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps.

Not about the phone (I have iPhone 12), but I have an app called Trunk Notes which is a wiki reader / editor. It was one of the only wiki apps I found that could work cooperatively with my own markdown vimwiki that I keep on my desktop (and sync via Dropbox or similar).

A few years back, it complained that it would no longer work in iOS version something-or-other and the author apologized because he could no longer maintain it. I never got around to deleting it, and to my surprise it still works to this day.

Yearly phone upgrades are akin to new sneakers. People want the latest thing, they do not need it. Phones have not improved for years in significant ways. There has been no new features. Only improvement has been cameras, but really how good of a camera does your average person need in their daily lives?

Do your sneakers last 7 years? Mine barely last 1.

I feel like they used to last longer but now I get literal holes in them

Time span is different, but people who like sneakers buy multiples per year.

I only replaced my iPhone 7 in 2021, with an SE, because it's a work phone and they didn't want to deal with battery replacement. It was (/is) is a perfectly capable phone for the vast majority of people.

I always trade my phones in to Apple, who reuse/recycle large portions of it.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/recycled-iphones-apple-produ...

Not sure if there's a better document that talks more about it, that was just what I could quickly find.

I love that Apple locks other people out of using even genuine parts for repairs and servicing, but is happy to collect them from people to reuse, themselves.

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