My recent move unearthed a lot of old electronics that I forgot that I had;
an old iPad that won't update anymore, an LG G4 with a
removable battery, a tablet from a Verizon promotional deal – this was
free – and an iPhone 8 with a very cracked screen.
I put a lot of things on OfferUp to give them a second life.
I also took some stuff to Best Buy for e-waste recycling.
I just couldn't believe how much tech trash I really had, especially
things like phones and tablets.
It seems like every tech company is trying to sell their product as
environmentally responsible.
That's why Apple claims its latest iPhone 12 lineup comes without a
charging block in the box.
Taken all together, the changes we've made for iPhone 12 cut over two
million metric tons of carbon emissions annually.
But that doesn't stop these companies from coming out with a host of new
phones every year, and the old ones end up in the drawer or a closet or a
box or worse end up in landfills.
In 2019, nearly 153 million smartphones were sold in North America, and in
2018, users were keeping their phones for about two years, but that time
period is likely to drop as folks upgrade to 5G-capable phones.
We don't have the technology to take a truck full of old iPhones, melt them
down, grind them up and make new iPhones out of them.
It is flat out physically impossible.
No one can do it. Apple can't do it.
Samsung can't do it. No one can do it.
Many of them are no longer made with screws.
They're made with glue.
Glue makes things very hard to take apart and recover materials from
because it degrades the value of the commodity product itself.
So smartphones and tablets are challenging.
About 6.9 million metric tons of waste was produced in the U.S.
alone in 2019.
That's about the same weight as nineteen Empire State Buildings.
Of that, only about 15 percent was collected for recycling.
And some of those minerals and metals being thrown away with our waste
aren't just valuable, they're toxic.
All of the arsenic, cadmium, lead, beryllium and other hazardous materials
that are contained in electronic waste should be kept out of landfills,
should be kept out of rivers and lakes, and also should be kept from being
dumped into emerging economies such as China, India or Africa.
Creating a phone that stayed relevant for four to five years instead of one
to two years could make a huge difference.
I'm frustrated with the world of technology journalism.
Every review of every product with an integrated battery should say this
product will stop working in eighteen months.
Until phones are made to last much longer, how can companies like Apple,
Google and Samsung fix the e-waste problem, and what can we as consumers
do to help?
We've created a pretty big mess for ourselves when it comes to e-waste.
The world created 53.6 million metric tons of waste in 2019, an average of
about 16 pounds per person.
That number is estimated to increase almost 40 percent by 2030.
And this is waste like old smartphone's has gold, iron, lead, copper and
other rare and potentially hazardous materials.
In fact, the raw materials in the waste thrown away in 2019 comes to about
57 billion dollars.
Less than 18 percent of that, about 10 billion dollars was recycled
properly. Many, but not all landfills leach into the ground when they're
rained upon. It's that leaching process that eventually degrades our
environment, ecosystem, vegetation, animals and gets back into our human
population.
Just to make one device takes a huge amount of raw materials, and that
mining process can be harmful to the environment.
It takes over two hundred pounds of raw material to make a phone like
this. These are one of the most environmentally destructive things that we
make because of all the materials that go into it.
Mining often uses large quantities of water, acids, other toxic or
costly reagents, and all of that presents an environmental challenge to be
able to mine responsibly.
Some of those mines can even dig up radioactive waste during the mining
process. This is the Mountain Pass Rare Earth mine outside of Las Vegas,
and it got shut down in the 1990s because they spilled radioactive waste
all over the valley floor outside of Las Vegas.
Over 100 companies, including Samsung and Apple, have signed on to the
Responsible Business Alliance Code of Conduct, which is a set of social,
environmental and ethical industry standards.
The problem is these companies keep making devices and we keep buying
them. In 2020, Apple released five new iPhones and Samsung released 15 new
phones. Apple reportedly sold about 196.2 million iPhones, and Samsung
sold about 296 million phones in 2019.
All told, an estimated 1.48 billion smartphones were sold worldwide in
2019. What do we do with these devices that whether they're new every two
or even obsolete every five, they do seem to become obsolete in a
relatively short timeframe.
In order to have a sustainable relationship with our technology, we have to
find a way to make only the products that we absolutely need and know
more. So once you've decided to part ways with your device, you could
throw it in a box like I used to do.
I don't recommend that.
But what if it's just a cracked screen or the battery runs out faster than
it used to? It should be easier to fix our phones.
That's where the Right to Repair movement comes in.
Right to Repair says, hey, if you're going to make a complex product, you
need to make parts, tools and information available to consumers.
Right? Farmers should have the right to fix their own tractors.
Consumers should have the right to fix their own iPhones.
Kyle Wiens started the popular repair site iFixit as a way to democratize
the process. Well, I was trying to fix my laptop and I couldn't find
information anywhere. I had dropped it on the power plug and it was a
little bit loose. And I learned that the repair manual had been online.
But Apple's lawyers had demanded that it be taken off the internet.
And that made me really mad.
Like, they have this information that could have made my life simpler and
they went out of their way to stop me from knowing how to work on my own
machine. Planned Obsolescence is the idea that a company strategically
slows down or otherwise makes it harder to use older devices.
Apple was just accused of this earlier in 2020.
Batteries are a consumable, they're a ware item and every manufacturer that
sells a product with a ware item should make replacements available.
You would not buy a car if the tires were welded to the car and there was
no way to change them.
Apple has made some changes over the years to make its phones more
repairable, like making some parts modular or using pull tabs instead of
glues for easy battery remove.
Unfortunately, Apple designs it for themselves to repair and not for
consumers to repair.
So they'll do things like put a proprietary screw on the bottom of the
phone that limits your access to it.
Luckily, companies like iFixit offer tools, guides and replacement parts
for phones, although Apple is not a huge fan of that.
There are certain battery and screen functions that only work if you get
your battery and screen replaced with Apple products by Apple certified
repair people. Many companies claim they want to repair products in-house
to maintain quality, and even Apple says it actually loses money in
repairs. Well, some of the things that Apple does is really compelling.
They're pushing their suppliers to use renewable energy is hugely
important. Most of the energy that goes into making this is fossil fuels
in China. It's mostly coal power making our phone.
But there are a lot of other things that Apple says, like they'll brag
about how much recycled material that they collect, that really is a red
herring. Apple has expanded its independent repair provider program to 140
businesses and 700 new locations, but it still believes that Apple
training is required for safe repairs.
As for Samsung, the world's second largest smartphone manufacturer, after
Huawei, its phones get even lower repairability scores than Apple from
iFixit's analysis.
We need to trust individuals to have some agency and not infantilize them
and say, oh, you could never turn a screwdriver.
I think that's just insulting.
And it might take federal regulation to truly force all involved to help
fix the problem.
Starting in January, you're going to see state legislatures across the
country from Massachusetts to California evaluating this issue.
And so if you're if you're interested, if you're passionate about it,
reach out to your legislator and tell them you support Right to Repair and
you'd like them to co-sponsor the bill.
If you can't fix your phone or donate it to someone who needs it, recycling
is a great option.
There were recyclers across the globe that process e-waste; GEEP in
Canada, Umicore in Belgium, and ERI, which processes an estimated five
percent of all e-waste recycled in the United States.
We got in it before there was an iPhone, before there was an iPad, before
Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize or an Academy Award for Inconvenient
Truth. In a nutshell, ERI receives electronic devices primarily from
consumers, businesses and original electronic manufacturers, or OEMs.
Consumers drop off their electronics at participating retail stores like
Best Buy and Staples, nonprofits like Salvation Army or at their local
solid waste authority.
Once the devices received, all of the data is destroyed, items are tested
for functionality, repaired, refurbished or processed into commodities
like steel, plastic, aluminum, copper, gold, silver, palladium and lead.
All of these materials that come out of ERI's facilities go to beneficial
reuse, like being made into new products and none go into landfills.
And Shegerian says they make a good business from this process.
We were profitable from the day we started.
17 years later we're still profitable.
And there's a lot of room for growth.
North America created 7.7 million metric tons of waste in 2019, and only
15 percent of that waste was documented to be collected and properly
recycled. All the materials that come out of it, the steel, the plastic,
the aluminum, the copper, the gold, the silver, the palladium, the lead is
all recyclable stuff, including the glass.
I mean, it all can go back for beneficial reuse.
None of this stuff ever had to go to landfill.
But this type of recycling isn't an option for every component in our
phones. Lithium ion batteries have to go through a special recycling
process and can be a fire hazard for recyclers.
Rare earth elements and magnets like the neodymium in our phone speakers
are harder to recycle, too, and many processes require toxic chemicals and
acids to separate materials.
If you are going to make one of rare earth elements, you should be ready to
produce almost 1.6 million gallons of waste gas that
contains hydrochloric acid.
And then you also think about the portion of that acid that goes into the
river and the sewage system, which was estimated to be near 53,000 gallons
for only one metric ton.
One option is to dismantle.
So which means you take this cellphone or the tablet and dismantle it and
then bring out the magnets.
But we all can agree that that's not efficient.
Ikenna Nlebedim's team has been working on a process to separate rare earth
materials from e-waste, like hard disk drives, electric motors and old
cell phones without the use of mineral acids or other environmentally
destructive chemicals that are used in other separation methods.
The process basically dissolves the rare earth containing materials in the
e-waste and leaves the rest to be collected and further recycled.
The recovered materials are more than 99 percent pure, and this process
can even recover cobalt when present, which isn't in demand element that
has been criticized for the way it's mined and sold.
The Ames Lab, where this process was developed, says it's ready to put it
into action and it has the support of the U.S.
Department of Energy to do so.
One thing about the process is that it works.
So if you give me a haptics drive today, I can give you the rare earth
content tomorrow or next or maybe in a week.
So what steps are being taken to minimize all of this e-waste?
When we got in the business approximately 17 or so years ago, there wasn't
a great call from the OEMs back then that we were involved with for our
plastics and metals to go back to them.
But now in 2020, the demand is huge.
Apple has dropped some recyclers who have unsustainable practices and
created robots to help disassemble and recycle about 1.2 million old
iPhones a year. For context, Apple reported 900 million active iPhones
worldwide at the end of 2018.
The iPhone 12 lineup uses 100 percent recycled rare earth materials and
its magnets, and the company's ultimate goal is to create a 100 percent
recycled iPhone.
They come in, they bring their engineers, they see our difficulties.
We're very unvarnished with them in terms of giving them feedback because
they want it. And the engineers that are developing new products that are
three to five years out are assessing what's problematic now, and they're
trying to work around that.
Recyclers and repairers say we can keep our phones out of landfills by
reducing our consumption, using recyclers like ERI and making sure new
processes like those from the Ames Lab get into the pipeline.
Even those flammable lithium ion batteries can find a new life with the
proper procedures.
Across the board, we need to see a commitment from these companies to
support their customers.
The customer centric thing to do is to support the product through its
entire lifecycle, not just during the warranty period.
And both Apple and Samsung are falling short on that.
I believe we're getting there.
I see the evolution moving there.
We're not there yet. I haven't seen yet myself a hundred percent cellphone
made out of recycled material.
Same with a tablet or even a printer yet.
But I think they're moving there.
Recycling is a great option, but there's so much more that needs to be done
by the manufacturers to stop the e-waste problem.
Phones aren't getting that much better anymore.
It used to be back when you went from the 3 to the 4, it was a huge
technological leap, and maybe there was a reason to upgrade regularly.
But now, I mean, I couldn't really tell you the differences between the 10
and the 12.
If your phone is beyond repair, think about a refurbished one.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency suggests you give away or sell or
donate any old phones that might still work.
If there's no hope for repair, recycle it at a participating store like
Best Buy or Staples, or your city might offer a collection service where
it will head to companies like ERI to be recycled.
Millions of people a year go into Best Buy and Staples and drop off their
old electronics, which is wonderful because again, all the stakeholders
are getting involved. But also I think it's about buying less, like how
can we how can we do more with less?
Recycling itself can be hard on the environment and dangerous because
electronics have to be dismantled to separate batteries and rare earth
metals. But a combination of solutions might be the answer to keeping
phones and other tech trash out of landfills.
Better repairability more cooperation between electronic companies,
consumers and recyclers, and better retention of rare materials in the
recycling process.
We're not too far away from the solution.
The pieces of the puzzle, they exist.
Just put them together.
Since we already have the know-how on how to responsibly recycle our old
electronics, shame on us if we don't engage in that good and responsible
behavior. The best thing that we as consumers can do is fix the stuff we
have and only buy exactly what we need.
That's what I'm going to do from now on.
I don't even know where these came from...