It happened to all of us: our cell phone breaks and, instead of fixing it, we are looking for an alternative to take advantage of the opportunity and renew the equipment. It is normal behavior and I dare say that it is standardized in much of society, but sadly it carries gods quite important problems from an environmental point of view. It seems that the statement "buying a new smartphone is worse than fixing the one you already have" is obvious, but what isn't so obvious is the footprint * we are leaving due to a simple gesture like changing mobile phones.
I ricercators Lotfi Belkhir e Ahmed Elmeligi area of McMaster University, in a study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, have determined that the purchase of a new smartphone consumes as much energy as an existing phone consumes for a decade. The study analyzed the carbon impact of the entire information and communication technology (ICT) sector from 2010 to 2020, including that produced by computers (desktops and laptops), monitors, smartphones and web servers. The data is devastating.
Smartphones are particularly dangerous due to their short life
If you ask someone how often they think they need to change their cell phone, they'll probably tell you every two years. There has come a point where two years of life seem like an eternity and that a mobile phone reaches a milestone. However, a two-year life cycle is very low, to the point that smartphones could be considered "disposable consumables".
This short life cycle, coupled with planned obsolescence, creates an urgent need to produce more and more devices with spend some time. The problem is that the production of new mobile phones is very costly in environmental terms. The main culprit for this is the material extraction which are used in the production of its internal components - coltan will surely sound familiar to you. This extraction represents between the 85 and 95% of total CO2 emissions of the device during its two years of life.
Another curious fact that the researchers reveal is that the smartphones with larger screens have a footprint di considerably greater carbon compared to older models, whose screens were smaller. In Co.Design they put the example of iPhone 6S and iPhone 7 Plus. Apple recognized that the building an iPhone 7 Plus generates 10% more CO2 than an iPhone 6S. In turn, other studies warn that, for its part, the iPhone 6S generated 57% more CO2 than the 4S.
Changing your mobile means consuming as much energy as repairing and using a smartphone for an entire decade
A worrying fact is that, according to Logit Belkhir, lead author of the study, only 1% of smartphones are recycled. This clashes with the numerous recycling proposals that many companies have launched in recent years. Worse still, the author himself acknowledges that they have been conservative in the conclusions of their research, which means that these figures could be much worse.
More smartphones, more servers, more pollution
According to Co.Design, "smartphones represent a rapidly growing segment of ICT, but the biggest culprits of CO2 emissions belong to their servers and data centers, which account for 45% of ICT emissions by 2020". This is because everything we do with our smartphones has to go through servers. The more users have a smartphone, the more apps and services they will use, more processing power will be needed, ie more servers and more pollution. And beware, the Internet of Things hasn't really taken off yet.
Belkhir claims that governments, through policies and taxes, they should do what is necessary for companies to use renewable energy sources. Google, Facebook and Apple have already committed to this, but only Apple has achieved, for now, that all its servers run on green energy. This, according to the author of the study, "is encouraging" even if he doesn't think it changes things too much.
In short, the next time you go to change mobile phones lightly, the same thing interests you to go to the technical service, fix it and keep squeezing it a little more. Not for you, but for the planet.
* Carbon footprint: all greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted as a direct or indirect effect of an individual, organization, event or product.
Source: Fast Co. Design, Science Direct, The Guardian
