The Space of eWaste

In the New York Times magazine Jon Mooallem details thorough investigation of electronic waste caused by the mobile phone industry - a rather timely unintentional follow-up to the debate we sparked last week when we criticised the CES show.

The article looks at the journey of the unwanted mobile phone into landfills or into a more complicated reselling and recycling journey. The article suggests that although recycling is a rather poisonous affair that impacts countries far away from the original purchaser, the alternative (landfill and creating new phones from new resources) can’t be continued for much longer.

Some stats and quotes:

On The Problem Of What’s In Your Phone

“In a phone that you can hold in the palm of your hand, you now have more than 200 chemical compounds,” [says Oladele A. Ogunseitan, an environmental-health scientist at the University of California], citing the results of an analysis of one new cellphone. “To try to separate them out and study what health effects may be associated with burning it or sinking it in water — that’s a lifetime of work for a toxicologist.”

Mining the gold needed for the circuit board of a single mobile phone generates 220 pounds of waste.

On Waste

The truth is, few of America’s phones are turned in for “recycling” in the first place. (It’s unclear how few. The figure of less than 1 percent, put forward in a groundbreaking report on phone recycling by the nonprofit Inform five years ago, is still repeated).

Right now, there are roughly 470 models of phone for sale in the United States. About 16 new ones come out every month. Many are only slightly altered versions of existing phones, suggesting how easily we get bored — how we’ll crave something that slides, say, instead of flips open. (There are currently 46 styles of Motorola Razr; Motorola has, in fact, projected which colors and finishes we’ll find most attractive through the year 2009.)

Right now, there are roughly 470 models of phone for sale in the United States. About 16 new ones come out every month. Many are only slightly altered versions of existing phones, suggesting how easily we get bored — how we’ll crave something that slides, say, instead of flips open. (There are currently 46 styles of Motorola Razr; Motorola has, in fact, projected which colors and finishes we’ll find most attractive through the year 2009.)

The Chinese themselves “retire” between 200 to 300 million phones every year.

There are more than half a billion old phones sitting in American drawers. That adds up to more than $300 million worth of gold, palladium, silver, copper and platinum.

On Recycling

Recycling feels good because we imagine it [as a] kind of alchemy… Ultimately, by weight, only 1/2 of 1 percent of the e-waste Umicore takes in cannot be safely sent back into the world in a usable form. Umicore estimates that, together with its competitors, it received only 1 percent of all phones that were discarded globally in 2006. Our obliviousness has mostly kept them from being recycled at all. When we do bother, we may not know, or be able to control, where the “recycled” phones go. Many enter a secondhand market in the developing world through a receding series of middlemen.

Given this state of affairs, you can’t help wondering if throwing your old phone in the trash, and into the high-tech sarcophagus of an American landfill, could end up doing less damage to the environment than recycling it. But that ignores yet another crucial part of the equation. As Heine explains, even though what he sells will probably be thrown out eventually, if a phone gets three or four more lives, “it’s absolutely better for the environment than having to make three or four more phones — phones that wouldn’t be recycled, either.”

On the Impact on the Developing World

75% of all phones in the least developed African nationas are cellphones and usage is increasing by up to 40%

In 2005, the Basel Action Network found 500 shipping containers of electronics arriving in Lagos each month. Useless computers were tossed into burning piles. And the phones - no matter hos many ramshackle resurrections they experience - will at some point meet the same fate.

The E.P.A. says modern American landfills are designed to keep toxics stewing inside from leaking out, so they don’t contaminate surrounding soil or drinking water. But landfills do fail, says Oladele A. Ogunseitan, an environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of last year’s study. More important, he notes, such landfills don’t exist in the developing world. In many places, garbage is tossed into informal dumps or bodies of water or burned in the open air — all dangerous ways of liberating and spreading toxics.

On Our Attitude Towards The New & Shiny

“Somewhere during the last 100 years, we learned to find refuge outside the species, in the silent embrace of manufactured objects,” Jonathan Chapman, a young product designer and theorist at the University of Brighton, writes in his book “Emotionally Durable Design.” But designers and consumers have snared themselves in an unsustainable trap, Chapman told me, since our affection for many high-tech objects is tied exclusively to their newness.

“The mobile phone occupies a kind of glossy, scratch-free world,” he says. Whereas a pair of jeans gains character over time, a phone does no such thing. “As soon you purchase it, you can only watch it migrating further away from what it is you want — a glossy, scratch-free object.” You might leave the plastic film over the display for a few days, just so you can take it off later and “give yourself a second honeymoon with the phone,” he says. But ultimately everything that first attracted you to it only deteriorates. You start looking at it differently. “It’s made of some kind of sparkle-finished polymer and it’s got some decent curves on it, but so what? The intimacy comes more from the fact that, within that hand-held piece of plastic, exists your whole world” — your friends’ phone numbers, your digital pictures, your music — and that stuff can be easily transferred to a new one. So you “fall out of love” with the phone, Chapman says.

Even the most idealistic visions of how e-waste should be recycled and reused take for granted that consumers and businesses will never reconsider why we are buying and discarding so many of those products, so quickly, in the first place. If the rush of castoffs isn’t likely to stop, we need to clear a proper path for it, considering all the inevitable compromises and costs along the way and delivering those products to as consequenceless a place as possible.

There is no heaven for cellphones. Wherever they go, it seems that something, somewhere, to some extent always ends up being damaged or depleted. The only heaven I came across was what Chapman described. It is an image in our heads — not of a place where we can send a used phone but one where we imagine each device when it’s brand-new, right before we first get our hands on it. That illusion of perfection, no matter how many times we see it spoiled, will always lure us into buying the next new phone and sending the last one careering on its way.

 

New York Times: The Afterlife of Cellphones

Related: CES: An Orgy Of Poison