Everyone has one of these. It's like your phone graveyard and with mine they know
there's like a couple of Kindles and then iPad at least one and they're all
these like phones.
And once upon a time these were like the most important
things I had.
And now it's just sort of in this drawer and I shut it and I hope
they kind of go away.
As a scientist I spend a lot of time in nature. I'm also a
tech geek. My phone is pretty much my entire life,
but it isn't just an environmental problem once I'm done using it. Around
80% of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from a smartphone occur before it
even reaches your hands.
On average, Americans swap out their phone every two years.
And about 1.4 billion phones have produced and sold every year, but where
these phones have put together matters as far as how big the energy footprint is.
They make these massive trips around the world to be built, assembled, and then
shipped.
Much of the journey's down on giant container ships, that go for a country to
country for each step of the process.
This happens with most things we buy
that are made overseas.
We often associate smog with our cars, but collectively
these ships can cause the same amount of smog and particulate pollution as all
the cars in the world.
That's kind of a big deal
Once a phone is put together, it
really isn't designed to be taken apart. And that means it's hard to repair.
We are users of electronics, we aren't participants with them anymore.
There's a great history of tinkering, for many other types of products, cars especially.
And I have a really really robust repair and tinkering community that surrounds this.
And you know like getting underneath our sink and taking things apart, and
figuring out how they work and really feeling confident about that.
Our phones
are these futuristic looking devices. They almost seem like sci-fi.
So it's intimidating to open them up and look inside. But fixing your phone isn't
impossible. It could save you a ton of money along
with reducing waste.
Ifixit's Gwendolyn Gay gives tutorials on how to take apart
and fix your electronics.
So I went to see her, to see if she could make this
process less scary.
So this is my personal cell phone that I'm gonna show.
How many times you open your personal phone?
I've opened it a couple of times
and this is relatively new, so I don't I don't I haven't needed to go in there
other than just of curiosity.
Sure you want to do this?
You're very worried for me.
No because you know it's like the reason is everything from banking to
travel, everything is on my phone.
Right. And I think that's why we get so nervous
about monkeying with it.
I think that holds people back, but I also think
the price of the phone holds people back.
Knowing that you're voiding your
warranty, so if you open your phone, this $600 phone, you're just S.O.L
don't do it right.
Right.
So there are resources if you're brave enough to repair
your phone but what if opening your phone wasn't so complicated in the first
place? There actually is a company trying to do exactly this.
It's called The Fairphone
Now I didn't even know you could actually build a phone like that, like
you could actually build it. Like a Lego set like that, but but so that's the Fairphone.
Fairphone, this is actually the second one.
Fairphone 2, and they're only
available in Europe and I can actually do,
So easy pie, we're already in. And you
can take out the battery just like that.
Wow.
No tools needed and then
the display is very similar, you just unlock it here and then you can
slide the display off.
Really.
So yeah and I can do that whole process in less than
20 seconds.
If all I had to do was pull a few tabs to fix my phone, I would be more
inclined to fix it myself.
Now the Fairphone has plans in the
future to release phone to the US, but with no specific date set, I'll need to
figure out another option.
Like getting rid of my old phones responsibly.
So let me ask you a different question. Why don't I actually want to throw this away?
You don't want to throw this away because
it everything inside here is going to create some kind of waste and it's going
to be toxic waste and if we're sending it to a place that is recycling it, say,
we still don't get everything out of it.
What's the most toxic thing in a phone?
I'd say the battery for sure.
You remove it wrong, it
will explode, so you have to take out the battery.
Really, this can blow up?
Yes, yeah. mm-hmm yes.
Don't do that.
So what do we do with our cell phone graveyard?
Now most of us just hoard them like I do, because it isn't just as simple as your
typical curbside pickup.
But there are easy ways to do this.
In New York and
California, stores that sell you a cell phone are required to accept it back
from you for recycling.
Companies like gazelle will even buy your old phones
off you.
There's also organizations dedicated to mapping out where you can
drop your electronics off.
Companies like Apple are starting to figure out a
better recycling process.
They have a robot called Liam that can take apart an
iPhone 6 in 11 seconds.
That's roughly 1.2 million iPhones per year.
The small
screws and other components can be used again.
Raw materials like silver found in
the phone's circuits, can be used in solar panels
And the tungsten that makes your
phone buzz, can be reused in tools.
But what if we could design a phone that
just lasted longer?
Now one of the big reasons why we replace our phones is
because our batteries just stop holding a charge.
Now imagine your battery
charging in minutes instead of hours.
And measuring its lifespan in decades rather
than just a couple of years.
University of California researchers are starting
to turn to 3d printing, to make this happen.
There's the potential there that
you can basically design the battery to improve its performance, so you could
start to play around with design parameters that you just didn't have
control over in traditional manufacturing. With 3d printing, if we can
now print a battery in any arbitrary shape that we want, what you can do then
is design your phone however you want to
design phone, and then fill it, the empty space in there, with your energy storage
material. These batteries would be made using an exciting new compound called
graphene. This means we could avoid harmful mining of materials like lithium
found in today's batteries.
All of this technology is in its early stages, but it
could radically transform the lifespan of AI electronics.
Look, it's perfectly
common in the airline industry to get on a plane that's like 30 years old.
You can't possibly imagining making a phone call on a 30 year old cell phone.
You wouldn't even know how to charge it today.
And that's the fundamental way we
use technology today and that it's innovating so fast and built in such a
way that it actually promotes disposability, but I think we're actually
at a very interesting tipping point. As people become more aware, companies
become more sensitive to this issue.
Hey Liam
what are you doing for Earth Day?
So, the next big flashy thing with our
smartphones might not be better graphics or a faster processor, but instead making
them more sustainable.
Ever wondered about the carbon footprint of your
smartphone or some amazing materials that could revolutionize your
electronics?
to find out more.