Hi Lisa! Thank you for sharing your perspective. I couldn’t get the data on annual phone replacement rate, but we do have access to average length of smartphone replacement purchase. According to Statista in 2017, the global replacement cycle is about 21 months for smartphones. However, there has been talks about the replacement rate going slower due to less innovation giving less incentive to buy a new phone. I guess we’ll have to see if there’d be another groundbreaking thing changing how we use mobile phones (or even…lack of thereof).

About “recycling” phone parts, I think that’s a good thought. I just read this piece on phone recycling, apparently if the phone is in good condition, it could be refurbished. If it’s not, it’s gonna be melted (by a “proper company”) or sold off to some scrapyard in backwater countries (by some shady companies). But even melting/smelting them still exerts toxic chemicals. Several manufacturers such as Samsung have started take initiatives to reduce waste, in US, they give away gift vouchers, in other countries we have trade-ins schemes (although I don’t really know where the traded phone goes to after that).

While I’m no expert on phone manufacturing, I believe that using recycled parts to make newer phones will require significant investment. And recyclable parts availability is subject to end-user’s willingness to recycle in the first place.

The bigger problem is, recycling phone depends on whether the end-user wants to exert some effort to recycle or not. As study has it, end-user expects environmental implications to be manufacturer’s responsibility.

The better focus should be on re-usability, like practiced by Fairphone. But we have already discussed the problem with Fairphone’s approach in the story, by assigning the cost of more ethical supply chain to end-users.

All in all, something has to happen to make an ethical and environmental friendly supply chain more economical than regular supply chain. That, is the great question of our age.

Cheers!