5.3 Billion Cellphones To Become Waste In 2022, Report Finds (phys.org) 58
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: More than five billion of the estimated 16 billion mobile phones possessed worldwide will likely be discarded or stashed away in 2022, experts said Thursday, calling for more recycling of the often hazardous materials they contain. Stacked flat on top of each other, that many disused phones would rise 50,000 kilometers (30,000 miles), more than a hundred times higher than the International Space Station, the WEEE research consortium found. Despite containing valuable gold, copper, silver, palladium and other recyclable components, almost all these unwanted devices will be hoarded, dumped or incinerated, causing significant health and environmental harm.
"Smartphones are one of the electronic products of highest concern for us," said Pascal Leroy, Director General of the WEEE Forum, a not-for-profit association representing forty-six producer responsibility organizations. "If we don't recycle the rare materials they contain, we'll have to mine them in countries like China or Congo," Leroy told AFP. Many of the five billion phones withdrawn from circulation will be hoarded rather than dumped in the trash, according to a survey in six European countries from June to September 2022. This happens when households and businesses forget cell phones in drawers, closets, cupboards or garages rather than bringing them in for repair or recycling. Up to five kilos (8 pounds) of e-devices per person are currently hoarded in the average European family, the report found.
According to the new findings, 46 percent of the 8,775 households surveyed considered potential future use as the main reason for hoarding small electrical and electronic equipment. Another 15 percent stockpile their gadgets with the intention to sell them or giving them away, while 13 percent keep them due to "sentimental value." "People tend not to realize that all these seemingly insignificant items have a lot of value, and together at a global level represent massive volumes," said Pascal Leroy. "But e-waste will never be collected voluntarily because of the high cost. That is why legislation is essential."
"Smartphones are one of the electronic products of highest concern for us," said Pascal Leroy, Director General of the WEEE Forum, a not-for-profit association representing forty-six producer responsibility organizations. "If we don't recycle the rare materials they contain, we'll have to mine them in countries like China or Congo," Leroy told AFP. Many of the five billion phones withdrawn from circulation will be hoarded rather than dumped in the trash, according to a survey in six European countries from June to September 2022. This happens when households and businesses forget cell phones in drawers, closets, cupboards or garages rather than bringing them in for repair or recycling. Up to five kilos (8 pounds) of e-devices per person are currently hoarded in the average European family, the report found.
According to the new findings, 46 percent of the 8,775 households surveyed considered potential future use as the main reason for hoarding small electrical and electronic equipment. Another 15 percent stockpile their gadgets with the intention to sell them or giving them away, while 13 percent keep them due to "sentimental value." "People tend not to realize that all these seemingly insignificant items have a lot of value, and together at a global level represent massive volumes," said Pascal Leroy. "But e-waste will never be collected voluntarily because of the high cost. That is why legislation is essential."
Hm (Score:3)
That's still less than the number of cell phone users that became a waste due to doom-scrolling on TikTok.
Re: (Score:2)
WTF?
Is he advocating for legislation to enable the e-waste police to come into your home periodically and confiscate the old phones you are "hoarding"?
I'm getting so tired o
Re: (Score:1)
Do you even realize when you're just making up a crazy story to bait yourself?
Re: (Score:2)
Ok, then you tell me what he meant by this:
And throughout the whole story, it was about individuals "hoarding" old cell phones at home.
Re: (Score:1)
If the only way you can imagine people being incentivized to return old cellphones for recycling is at gunpoint, you definitely need to chill out. You can handle it the same way you handle aluminum cans, charge people and give them the money back when they return it. Even three to five bucks would probably do the job.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You're all upset over a fiction entirely of your own creation. You anti-govenrment nuts always seem to be outraged over imaginary things. Calm down. The sky isn't falling. Big scary government isn't coming to your house to raid your junk drawer. You're just not that important.
What he's actually saying is nothing new or even anything controversial. He wants companies producing this kind of waste to take responsibility for its proper collection and disposal. The goal, obviously, is to keep this stuff o
Dear slashdot: (Score:5, Informative)
Annoying us with popups is NOT OKAY.
I realize this post is off topic, but SO IS YOUR DAMN POPUP!
Please stop, learn your lesson, and never make this mistake again.
Re: (Score:2)
uBlock Origin
Imagine (Score:5, Funny)
a Beowulf cluster of 5.3 billion old cellphones!
(What, comment is too old-school?)
If they have value... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Owning things is now hoarding, you dirty capitalist!
Given that I have a box in my basement that contains almost every cellphone my family has owned over the last three decades, it sometimes might actually be closer to "hoarding".
The funny thing is that I actually could put a few of those to good use for Raspberry Pi-like jobs, but due to the proprietary specs on most of them, there's usually no practical way to run up-to-date software on them.
Re: (Score:3)
Why are you not paying me to take it?
A typical cellphone contains lithium worth about $10, gold worth about $1.50, silver worth about 20 cents, and a few cents of tantalum and cobalt.
The battery is worth recycling, but everything else costs more to extract than it's worth.
The gold is cost-effective to extract, but the process is filthy and only makes sense where environmental regulations are ignored.
Re: (Score:3)
That seems extremely optimistic. Try less than $1.40 worth of lithium:
Spot prices for lithium are about $72/kg, which is about twice what it cost last year. https://www.dailymetalprice.co... [dailymetalprice.com]
At that price, if an iPhone 14 were made of pure lithium, it would only be worth (0.172kg)*($72/kg) = $12. Even if the phone were nothing but battery, a typical battery is only 11% lithium, so $1.36
Re: (Score:2)
Spot prices for lithium are about $72/kg
That is the spot price for lithium carbonate (Li2CO2), which is only 19% lithium.
Re: (Score:2)
That could make up much of the difference, if true - where are you seeing that?
Their price for copper is close to the going rate for recycling bare copper wire, so presumably that's the raw metal price. It seems unlikely they'd list the price for lithium ore alongside copper metal without even making mention of it.
Re: (Score:2)
where are you seeing that?
On this page [dailymetalprice.com]. Go to "How is Lithium Traded?" and it says "DailyMetalPrice.com tracks the Lithium carbonate price."
It seems unlikely they'd list the price for lithium ore alongside copper metal
Lithium ore is not lithium carbonate. It is either lithium chloride if extracted from brine or lithium aluminum inosilicate, LiAl(SiO3)2, from mined ore.
Lithium is stored and transported as lithium carbonate because the metal is reactive and flammable. It can't be exposed to air or water.
Re: (Score:2)
>Lithium is stored and transported as lithium carbonate because the metal is reactive and flammable. It can't be exposed to air or water.
Ah, right. Good point, and good catch.
Re: (Score:3)
Selective Wannabe Environmentalists (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Let's turn it around. How many Tesla batteries could be made from 5.3 billion cell phone batteries.
A quick Google search suggests there are 2-3 grams of Lithium in a cell phone battery, and 63kg of Lithium in a Tesla battery.
So doing the math:
(2 * 5.3billion) / 64000
= 168,254 Tesla batteries worth of Lithium in those 5.3 billion phones, just going by Lithium used, and being conservative about the amount in a cell battery.
Re: (Score:2)
Together at global values (Score:2)
How much fuel will be expended gathering up these 5 billion phones, to put them where they can have their materials recovered? Will that fuel be paid for by the value of the materials recovered?
What other costs are involved in recovering materials from these global phones? Are those costs covered by the recovery?
It's wonderful to think about how we can recover things, another to consider how to actually do it.
Re: (Score:2)
The data on the phones including SIMS may be part of why people hang onto them, much like old hard drives.
Re: (Score:2)
Very little if done intelligently.
Make it like bottle recycling in some places - if you sell cell phones (any electronics?), you're required to put out a recycling collection machine that refunds your deposit. Then people do the initial collection for you while at the store anyway. Net increase in fuel consumption = ~0
From there you're tied into a huge delivery infrastructure, shipping stuff from where it's made to where its purchased. And all those vehicles eventually have to return to where stuff is ma
Re: (Score:2)
How much are you planning on increasing the price of the phone to cover enticing people to return them? You claim to have made people pay that before-hand; is it going to cover the cost of the program?
There are very few phones sold in the U.S. that were manufactured here. Are you figuring on setting up a centralized recycling environment, or handle each manufacturer separately? How do you distribute the cost of handling the phones?
A Walmart does not take a semi-load of phones in during a given month. How mu
Re: (Score:2)
A $0.20 deposit seems to do a pretty good job getting people to return bottles rather than throwing them away, I doubt you'd need much more for phones, where even a $5 deposit would rarely alter the price much. And if they're not being thrown away then that's great, get more use out of them.
Why would you need to fill a semi from one store? When a store has a full bin they put themselves on the list, and a trucker stops at dozens if not hundreds of stores on the return trip.
Who cares who manufactures the p
Batteries? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
China, Congo, wherever... it's all ours! (Score:1)
'"Smartphones are one of the electronic products of highest concern for us," said Pascal Leroy, Director General of the WEEE Forum, a not-for-profit association representing forty-six producer responsibility organizations. "If we don't recycle the rare materials they contain, we'll have to mine them in countries like China or Congo," Leroy told AFP'.
Having got the permission of the governments of those countries, of course. Although a lot of Western foreign policy can be better understood as the attempt to
If they are so valuable, why not pay? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
2025 PC waste (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
In theory you can get Chrome OS Flex from Google now through Chrome, and install it on whatever. In practice their Chrome addon bullshit failed to make a bootable disk for me
Phonium mines (Score:3)
If a pile of discarded cellphones were considered as ore, how would the concentration of lithium, gold, and other valuable elements compare to the low-concentration ores already being exploited profitably? The problem of forming that pile in the first place could be addressed by charging a deposit at purchase that would be refunded when the old device is turned in at a central collection point.
Phone lifetime is short by design (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Batteries are hard to replace, and the whole package is sealed tight.
Yes, so hard you need to give it to some 15 year old kid at a corner store to do it. Sorry but this "wowes me" excuse is lame. Aside from Apple's stupid hardware lockouts replacing a battery or a broken screen or anything else is a trivial fix and you can find a shop to do so at basically every supermarket.
And it's not hard to do it yourself either, it just takes some finesse.
Saying the useful life is shorter simply because you personally are unable to pop out a battery isn't an excuse. The useful life of m
Simple solution (Score:2)
Mandate that batteries be user-replaceable, OR (what I prefer) leave the choice to the companies but then require that they pay a fee per unit to cover the cost not just for return/recycling, but ALSO recognizing their proportional cost for the units that aren't so returned.
The excuse about permabatteries being better because they can save the 0.5mm plastic sheath they'd need if they were replaceable is mostly bullshit. If you gave people the choice between 1mm thicker phone and replaceable batteries, vs n
Re: (Score:2)
Wake Up Call / Steve Cutts (Score:1)
Steve Cutts makes brilliant animations. His videos are entertaining, and thought provoking. He has a channel on YouTube.
Here is his 6 minute video on the subject of cell phone waste:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhR_zKUn6jc
I don't think so. (Score:2)
8 billion people on earth (Score:2)
And these researchers claim that 5 billion smartphones will be discarded in a year?
I'm guessing they surveyed urban young people who think that their smartphones are free, because the TV commercial says they're free. Or maybe they surveyed Apple employees. There are a lot of us who switch phones only every few years, when we have to, not just because the new model came out.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm guessing they surveyed urban young people who think that their smartphones are free
No they probably surveyed people in 2022 who have mountains of unused phones laying around, which aren't free as much as useless.
Household of two here, not young anymore, 3 smartphones in my immediate vicinity. One more in a drawer upstairs (the oldest about 12 years old), and honestly no idea how many the wife has, but I've seen at least 3 laying in various drawers.
And yes I've even thrown a phone or two away over the years.
Lots of reasons (Score:2)
I've scrapped lots of portable devices. Several reasons: they quit working outright, their battery life was no longer acceptable, their vendor no longer supported them enough for them to be useful, or the network they used was shut down. The last was my most recent, the phone company shut down a legacy network and my old phone became a paperweight. So I got a new one and dropped the old one off at the recycling depot. I assume the right thing happens after that. If not, we have a problem.
I wonder about th
The first thing we could do (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Apple is already doing this. My 11 Pro Max is still very usable and I don't plan to replace it this cycle. This is in contrast to ten years ago when an iPhone would start feeling slow and laggy after only two years.
Other phone makers need to catch up. Match Apple's software support so that their phones are useful longer.
Re: (Score:2)
LineageOS : Send Beer (Score:2)
Any philanthropists who actually care about ewaste want to fund Lineage to develop and maintain builds for older phones?
Even 20% of 5.3 billion is a huge RoI.
In my experience actual solutions and places to spend money usefully are frowned upon by most organizations that would rather have something to complain about.
If only.... (Score:2)
Most people knew how to make DIY projects out of them. First would be removing the battery and soldering voltage supply leads to the contacts so you don't have that pesky and potentially dangerous old battery to worry about. And then maybe flashing the firmware with a new image assuming Android with an unlocked bootloader. The rest is up to the one doing the project.
It's not 5.3 billion phones but 5.3 billion COMPUTERS going to waste here.
luckily the phones are gettin thinner (Score:2)
Luckily, the current generation phones are thinner. So the next time we discard 5.3 billion of them, the stack will only be about 35000 km high.