Where i live you can get a phone contract that includes the latest model, a new phone, once a year. SO if you sign up now for an iPhone 7, in a year you will ge

Where i live you can get a phone contract that includes the latest model, a new phone, once a year. SO if you sign up now for an iPhone 7, in a year you will get a 7s, a year after the 8 and so on. You return the phone you have to the telecoms company. I don't know what they do with all of the returned phones, I assume they sell them on refurbished, but I also assume that a percentage of those that are not broken will fall into the telecom's basket of not cost-effective to refurbish. Those are phones that would have remained in use and continued to be used. Even then, the amount of new phones being manufactured just because consumers want to consume the latest thing with little to no real benefit is wasteful.