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Have you tried replacing a phone battery recently? It involves using hot air to soften the glue, a lot of manual labor, unplugging wires, and carefully replacin

Have you tried replacing a phone battery recently? It involves using hot air to soften the glue, a lot of manual labor, unplugging wires, and carefully replacing the battery. Then you need to glue everything back together and pray the device works. There's a straightforward solution to this and the recycling problem: 1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery 2. Add a very small tax to each device with such battery (in the order of cents) 3. Pay the same amount back to whoever brings the battery to a recycling plant There you go. This system has only one knob (the amount paid per battery) and by tweaking it you can adjust the incentive to recycle. You sit back and let the market sort out the details. Not to mention that this would extend the lifetime of phones by making it easy to replace the battery.

doiwin 6y ago
You won't have to use hot air if you go with a phone with replaceable battery. They are fewer these days, but they still exist: https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/sets/3 https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/sets/3
judge2020 6y ago
Are there any tradeoffs with easily replaceable batteries? Maybe water resistance, thinness, compactness, etc?
- drrotmos 6y ago
  You can still make a device with easily replaceable batteries water resistant (or even water proof), but it's easier (read: less bulky) to do it with a non-replaceable battery. Compactness is definitely a major tradeoff though.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    Yeah, my Galaxy Xcover is IP68 (dust/water resistant) and the battery is trivial to replace. I think the situation is the same for CAT and other rugged phones.
- pavlov 6y ago
  Non-replaceable batteries is one of Apple’s saddest legacies. They invented this design for the iPod, and carried it over to the iPhone. Eventually it was copied across the industry. Before June 2007 every mobile phone had an easily replaceable battery, except some extremely niche “design phones” like the Nokia 7280 [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7280 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7280
  - asutekku 6y ago
    You did not answer the question, but started an Apple rant.
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      I think it's allowed to respond to someone else's post without answering their questions.
      - asutekku 6y ago
        Yes, but it should somehow relate to the original post.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    This is weird framing, because I have replaced about four batteries on iDevices. Two on my own, and two at a corner-store repair shop. I'll gladly take the daily convenience of sturdier, more durable devices over the once-every-two-years convenience of a battery replacement with less labor. It's an excellent design trade off, IMHO.
    - pantalaimon 6y ago
      I never had durability issues with the phones that had replaceable batteries. It was only with those devices where the battery wasn’t meant to be replaced where they would not go together as nicely as they did before the battery change.
- avar 6y ago
  One reason screens don't break as easily as they used to on modern phones is because they tend to have a sturdy metal frame that the screen and backside are glued onto under tension. This is one of the main things to beware of when you need to open up a phone with a heat gun and repair it. I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried. I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones. Maybe Apple is different, but if you break something on a modern $300-500 Android phone such as the screen, motherboard, sub-board etc. you can easily order a replacement from China for $10-50. You need to own a couple of things like a heat gun, and maybe a soldering iron, but you'd also need a torx screwdriver set etc. for a "repairable" phone. The cost difference isn't that great. Phones are wildly more repairable than most other electronics you can buy nowadays or would have bought in the 70s-90s. I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.
  - ses1984 6y ago
    I think 70s-90s appliances are a lot easier to repair than phones, you usually can source the parts from a local electronics shop, and they don't require the dexterity of a surgeon to work on.
    - avar 6y ago
      How do you source those parts? Figure out which part of the main board of your TV amplifier burned itself out with an electric meter, oscilloscope etc., and know enough about electronic repair to source a replacement resistor, capacitor etc.? Sure, that's possible, and I'll give you that if you're manually soldering something on a circuit board that'll be a breeze compared to the surgery of trying the same thing on a modern phone. My point was that for the average consumer without deep electronics repair knowledge the situation has become much better. If your $500 TV broke you weren't going to find a $10 replacement for its main board that you could pop in with just the skill of operating a screwdriver. But with modern phones you can do that with just a heat gun, credit card and a screwdriver. Thus I think even though e.g. replacing the internal memory or CPU on these devices has become practically impossible, they're a lot more repairable in practice than most other electronics, current or historical.
- ckocagil 6y ago
  At a cursory glance there might be. However this restriction will force companies to experiment with other designs. Maybe they'll have to use proper gaskets. Maybe phones will end up being 1mm thicker. These _might_ be negative, but IMO it's still better than the status quo: right now we're not putting a price on the hidden costs of littering the earth and wasting lithium. Ignore these externalities long enough and they will come back to bite you, the prime example being carbon emissions and global warming.
  - jimkleiber 6y ago
    maybe in the future we'll see people mining lithium and other resources from landfills.
    - Tossrock 6y ago
      "Before its acquisition he had been the cofounder and technical director of a small company called Dumpmines, which was in the business of digging up and processing old landfills, recovering the valuable materials that had been thrown away in a more wasteful age." - Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, 1993.
- pdoege 6y ago
  Yes, there are lots. Largest of which is that the manufacturers have to balance onerous return penalties vs. weight and size. The solution is to use a monocoque and glue everything down. Thus, consumers buy the cheapest plans, carriers push the costs onto the manufacturers, manufacturers push the costs back to the consumer for repairs, ad infinitum. There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers. Until consumers vote with their wallets or regulations the dynamic will not change.
  - Reason077 6y ago
    Batteries also seem to be getting better in recent years, which reduces the need for them to be easily replaceable. With previous generations of iPhone, my battery was usually pretty much toast after 2 years of use. Greatly reduced battery life, random shutdowns at low battery charge, and in one case even swelling which pushed apart the phone's case. But I've had my current phone, an iPhone X, for almost 3 years now (since November 2017). The battery hardly seems to have degraded at all despite intensive use and daily charging. Battery status reports it still has 91% of original capacity, and that hasn't changed for a while.
  - toast0 6y ago
    > There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers. It's hard to vote with my wallet on replacable batteries because I already have to vote on other issues. In today's market my priorities are 3-4GB of ram (which is insane, but that's what it takes to prevent my launcher from swapping out, and it's really frustrating when it's swapped out), 3.5mm headphone jack, and usb-c. Once you have those three things, I would prefer a removable battery, but whatever. Also, apparently you need to specify decent vibration, because motorola doesn't have it.
    - chaosharmonic 6y ago
      This. Mine are: display output, bootloader unlock, waterproofing. And that's maybe three good, current phones at any given time. Also, while a headphone jack would be great, once kernel-level support for ADC v3 is smoothed out (4.19 is the first LTS to have this, and has only started showing up on Android devices this year) my real dream is two USB ports.
eli 6y ago
California already has an ewaste fee added to devices, no? Or maybe that doesn’t cover phones.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  The operative part isn't the fee, it's the deposit. If it isn't profitable to recycle, you can make it profitable by making the fee reclaimable when it's recycled.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
    Yup. That's what they do with lead and batteries and their core charge.
  - aeternum 6y ago
    Should we make it artificially profitable to recycle? Recycling is often resource-intensive, we need to be careful we don't create a system in which we're using more energy and resources to recycle just to make ourselves feel good. It's quite possible that throwing all the used batteries in a dump now then digging them back out in the future once recycling tech has improved and raw resources become more scarce might be the best way to go. This cycle has already occurred with old electronics (companies are successfully mining garbage dumps for the gold connectors and traces).
    - dalbasal 6y ago
      "throwing all the used batteries in a dump now then digging them back out in the future once recycling tech has improved" The fact that there have been instances where this has occurred doesn't mean its a good plan. I agree that not all plans work out in retrospect, but neither does doing nothing. If we look at the balance of cases, we have done a lot more harm with a lack of environmental policies than we have with poor policies. Overall the mechanism is solid enough. If a product has EOL issues, a recycling deposit builds the solution into the initial price. It doesn't even need to be recycling. Could be safe disposal.
sukilot 6y ago
For the tiny fraction of people who need to change battery, just do the labor. Everyone else can enjoy a better phone until the OS is obsolete and the device is physically degraded.
- on_and_off 6y ago
  thinner maybe, better is subjective.
  - cowsandmilk 6y ago
    Removable batteries of the same size have less life and need to be replaced more frequently. For a given volume of battery, no removable gives you longer life for a single use and a longer usable life in general before it needs to be replaced.
    - MAGZine 6y ago
      They're the same battery. Maybe packaged slightly differently, but being able to remove it does not affect it's ability to supply power.
      - samatman 6y ago
        "packaged slightly differently" has to mean "packaged durably enough to protect the bare battery from damage". By the very nature of the design constraint, a removable battery will take up more space inside a device than the same chemistry packaged without the protective case, springs to hold the contacts in place, and so on. That means by eschewing it, you can take your pick among: a thinner phone, more components, or a larger battery. There's no way around this.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > That means by eschewing it, you can take your pick among: a thinner phone, more components, or a larger battery. There's no way around this. That's making a lot of unstated assumptions. To start with, that the battery needed to consume all available space. The width and length of the phone are determined by the size of the screen, and a certain minimum depth is required to prevent this: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/apple-bendgate-internal-documents-iphone-6-plus https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/a... So then you have the dimensions of the phone already dictated by concerns other than the battery. At that point you could still use all of the available space for a battery, but if that's more battery capacity than you actually need, it makes the phone heavier. So you could very well already have some unused space inside the phone and not have any trade off with thickness at all, and in practice this is true for several phones that nonetheless have epoxied batteries. Moreover, even if the trade off you're describing exists for a given phone, that doesn't prove it's significant. Do we have to destroy the environment over a fraction of a millimeter?
late2part 6y ago
You said: 1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery How do you propose to mandate this?
- WalterSear 6y ago
  You make the sale of non-replaceable battery devices too onerous in California.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Create a law that says that if the battery is not user replaceable then the manufacturer must replace it for free when its charge capacity drops below 90% of its original capacity. That would shift the market pretty quickly towards user replaceable batteries.
avar 6y ago
> Add a very small tax to each device with such battery (in the order of cents) [and pay it] back to whoever brings the battery to a recycling plant. We do this with the likes of glass bottles and beverage cans and lot of them just end up in the trash. It only makes sense economically because consumers can bring them back in large batches, but even then the money you get back often doesn't justify the extra hassle economically. If you're going to raise the price until it does you've just recreated the cobra effect[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  I don't think it's really comparable; no one is going to be breeding batteries like cobras, regardless of the reward. Indeed, the comparison with bottle deposit programmes is apt— there are people in my city who rifle through blueboxes on the curb pulling out refundable items. Maybe this bothers some people, but it seems like a reasonable thing; you couldn't directly pay someone to do that work, but you can incentivize it to happen anyway, same as shopping carts get gathered up and returned by homeless people for a dollar a pop. If a token reward motivated people to scrounge disposed-of electronics pulling out lithium-ion batteries for return, that would be terrific!
  - hansvm 6y ago
    That seems like exactly the wrong thing to incentivize. If it's in a blue bin it's going to be recycled like it's supposed to anyway -- you've just transferred a bit of wealth from people who buy bottles to people who rifle through recyclables. If we want a wealth transfer, can't we think of a better way to accomplish it?
    - mikepurvis 6y ago
      Maybe for cans, but major brewers in Ontario use a small number of standard bottles, and when those come back through the return system, they are in fact pressure washed and refilled— a far more environmentally efficient process than sending them for general-stream glass recycling. I worked briefly at the Molson plant in Etobicoke and they literally have machines which cut apart skids of 12-pack boxes, wash off the old labels, all of it.
afrojack123 6y ago
Yep. I agree with this. I remember when cell phone batteries were easy to remove. Just take the cover off the back and put in a new one. However, this doesn't help the corporations sell more products.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  An iPhone is 3x thinner than a Nokia 3310, but has a battery with 3x the capacity of the 3310.
  - ThePadawan 6y ago
    My Samsung Galaxy S3 had a thickness of of 8.6mm and a 2100mAh battery that was removable via the back cover [0]. My Samsung Galaxy S6 has a thickness of 6.8mm and a 2550mAh battery that requires unglueing to replace [1]. I'd much rather carry around the extra 1.8mm for the extra repairability. [0] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php [1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s6-6849.php https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s6-6849.php
    - afrojack123 6y ago
      True. I was unaware of this.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    And some variants of the 3310 claim a month of battery life. It isn’t an particularly fair comparison as they are very different devices that both get called ‘phones’, but that is a great battery life. https://thinkmarketingmagazine.com/new-nokia-3310-battery-life-31-days/ https://thinkmarketingmagazine.com/new-nokia-3310-battery-li...
05 6y ago
Use isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol to soften the glue.
jariel 6y ago
Sounds like some regulations are needed around high-value substances that are recyclable -> needs to be 'extractable'.
dehrmann 6y ago
> 1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery Apple has argued that they can fit a bigger, harder to remove battery into devices, and the added capacity because it's bigger makes up for it being hard to remove. I've changed batteries on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and it's very straightforward; I'm not sure how much truth there isn't to that argument on laptops. Phones are so small that I find that explanation more plausible.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  Maybe Apple could be given a choice here: user-replaceable battery with a refundable core charge, or they have to build a battery recycling program with the same sort of core charge applied at purchase. The core charge would be returned if the user sells the phone to any legit business (funded by the core charge originally paid to Apple). If the user sells the phone on eBay, the buyer can recover the core charge later, so it’s part of the market value of any phone that has a battery in it. The charge also could be recovered if the phone is given to a recycling center. It’s on Apple to figure out how to get the batteries out and pay whoever does that work. Apple can decide whether to do the engineering to make the battery replaceable up front, or fund the delicate labor of taking apart the phone later.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > or they have to build a battery recycling program with the same sort of core charge applied at purchase They will already recycle your battery for free. I think they will actually also recycle other manufacturers' batteries for free as well, and also any random loose batteries you hand them. Seems pretty reasonable to me?
    - shajznnckfke 6y ago
      I think the missing piece here is the core charge, which makes the average user think of the battery as something of value that shouldn’t just be thrown in the trash. Currently, I think a lot of users with an obsolete phone with a smashed screen would just throw it in the garbage.
hhjj 6y ago
While i agree laws are very welcome to fight those problems i think you should let capitalism do it work and implement laws more like: 1. Define recycling cost of product 2. Apply tax on cost Better recycling may not be equal to ease of replacement.
saxonww 6y ago
This is very similar to what's done today for car batteries in most of the US: you pay a deposit or core charge when buying a new battery, and it's refunded when you return the old one for recycling. https://batterycouncil.org/page/State_Recycling_Laws https://batterycouncil.org/page/State_Recycling_Laws
- mmrezaie 6y ago
  In Europe when you buy a battery you are already paying the tax for recycling, and places where they sell these batteries have to accept the dead batteries and send them for recycling.
  - Spare_account 6y ago
    This is exactly what is described in Bestbuy three comments upthread, but in reality what is happening is the batteries are dumped in the trash. What _really_ happens to the batteries that you responsibly deposit in the recycling container at your local supermarket?
    - pacamara619 6y ago
      > What _really_ happens to the batteries that you responsibly deposit in the recycling container at your local supermarket? Whatever the manager wants to happen of course. Unless you actually check some places out, see how they handle recycling and hit them with a hefty fine if they don't do it properly.
    - Galanwe 6y ago
      Is it legal to dump batteries in the trash in the US? In France you could get a significant fine for that. If you throw other recyclables in regular bin, you would also get a warning the first time, and the workers would not pickup you trash after that if you continue. Not sure how they are incentivized to check the bins, but they do.
      - saxonww 6y ago
fsflover 6y ago
> Have you tried replacing a phone battery recently? It involves using hot air to soften the glue, a lot of manual labor, unplugging wires, and carefully replacing the battery. Not if you choose a company that cares about the environment: https://fairphone.com https://fairphone.com
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
can we do this plan, except make the well-financed corporates take care of the cost of cleaning up the toxic waste that they made?
- mod 6y ago
  No. The cost, of course, gets passed to the consumer, even if you want to call it something else.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    I bet they have better resources for finding and recovering their toxic waste after EOL than their customers.
brentonator 6y ago
It's kinda nice we don't have to worry about our phones dying if they get splashed or dropped in a pool though right? That has definitely cut down on a lot of waste.
- grosswait 6y ago
  Replaceable battery and waterproof are not mutually exclusive. Ref Samsung Galaxy Xcovee pro
hyperpallium2 6y ago
There's a related problem: for most phones with removable batteries, you can't buy replacements. And each model is carefully designed for a unique battery and terminal geometry. This doesn't prevent battery recycling, but it does junk the entire phone, which as you saynis harder to recycle. Mandate standardized batteries. (Perhaps antitrusting battery manufacture would achieve this automatically, since they'd make more money.) California has led this kind of change before, with citizen bills. C'mon California!
spullara 6y ago
No thanks.
agumonkey 6y ago
Oh man, the other day I found a bunch of early 2000s phones. It was such an odd feeling, so utilitarian. Fits your hand, absolutely not fragile.. and popping the back cover then removing the battery block require as less time as neurons. I was left dumbfounded for a second thinking how is that not better.
totalZero 6y ago
This sounds kind of reasonable if you're only optimizing for battery recycling, but in practice this kind of regulation would make the world worse. In other words, you want regulators to force phone companies to stop making thin, waterproof phones. It makes far more sense IMO to incentivize recycling/recovery for unwanted devices, and then harvest batteries in a professional facility rather than asking individuals to do it prior to recycling their devices. > You sit back and let the market sort out the details. You say this but you are suggesting the imposition of a very substantial regulation.

doiwin 6y ago

You won't have to use hot air if you go with a phone with replaceable battery. They are fewer these days, but they still exist: https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/sets/3 https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/sets/3

judge2020 6y ago

Are there any tradeoffs with easily replaceable batteries? Maybe water resistance, thinness, compactness, etc?

drrotmos 6y ago
You can still make a device with easily replaceable batteries water resistant (or even water proof), but it's easier (read: less bulky) to do it with a non-replaceable battery. Compactness is definitely a major tradeoff though.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Yeah, my Galaxy Xcover is IP68 (dust/water resistant) and the battery is trivial to replace. I think the situation is the same for CAT and other rugged phones.
pavlov 6y ago
Non-replaceable batteries is one of Apple’s saddest legacies. They invented this design for the iPod, and carried it over to the iPhone. Eventually it was copied across the industry. Before June 2007 every mobile phone had an easily replaceable battery, except some extremely niche “design phones” like the Nokia 7280 [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7280 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7280
- asutekku 6y ago
  You did not answer the question, but started an Apple rant.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    I think it's allowed to respond to someone else's post without answering their questions.
    - asutekku 6y ago
      Yes, but it should somehow relate to the original post.
- epistasis 6y ago
  This is weird framing, because I have replaced about four batteries on iDevices. Two on my own, and two at a corner-store repair shop. I'll gladly take the daily convenience of sturdier, more durable devices over the once-every-two-years convenience of a battery replacement with less labor. It's an excellent design trade off, IMHO.
  - pantalaimon 6y ago
    I never had durability issues with the phones that had replaceable batteries. It was only with those devices where the battery wasn’t meant to be replaced where they would not go together as nicely as they did before the battery change.
avar 6y ago
One reason screens don't break as easily as they used to on modern phones is because they tend to have a sturdy metal frame that the screen and backside are glued onto under tension. This is one of the main things to beware of when you need to open up a phone with a heat gun and repair it. I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried. I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones. Maybe Apple is different, but if you break something on a modern $300-500 Android phone such as the screen, motherboard, sub-board etc. you can easily order a replacement from China for $10-50. You need to own a couple of things like a heat gun, and maybe a soldering iron, but you'd also need a torx screwdriver set etc. for a "repairable" phone. The cost difference isn't that great. Phones are wildly more repairable than most other electronics you can buy nowadays or would have bought in the 70s-90s. I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.
- ses1984 6y ago
  I think 70s-90s appliances are a lot easier to repair than phones, you usually can source the parts from a local electronics shop, and they don't require the dexterity of a surgeon to work on.
  - avar 6y ago
    How do you source those parts? Figure out which part of the main board of your TV amplifier burned itself out with an electric meter, oscilloscope etc., and know enough about electronic repair to source a replacement resistor, capacitor etc.? Sure, that's possible, and I'll give you that if you're manually soldering something on a circuit board that'll be a breeze compared to the surgery of trying the same thing on a modern phone. My point was that for the average consumer without deep electronics repair knowledge the situation has become much better. If your $500 TV broke you weren't going to find a $10 replacement for its main board that you could pop in with just the skill of operating a screwdriver. But with modern phones you can do that with just a heat gun, credit card and a screwdriver. Thus I think even though e.g. replacing the internal memory or CPU on these devices has become practically impossible, they're a lot more repairable in practice than most other electronics, current or historical.
ckocagil 6y ago
At a cursory glance there might be. However this restriction will force companies to experiment with other designs. Maybe they'll have to use proper gaskets. Maybe phones will end up being 1mm thicker. These _might_ be negative, but IMO it's still better than the status quo: right now we're not putting a price on the hidden costs of littering the earth and wasting lithium. Ignore these externalities long enough and they will come back to bite you, the prime example being carbon emissions and global warming.
- jimkleiber 6y ago
  maybe in the future we'll see people mining lithium and other resources from landfills.
  - Tossrock 6y ago
    "Before its acquisition he had been the cofounder and technical director of a small company called Dumpmines, which was in the business of digging up and processing old landfills, recovering the valuable materials that had been thrown away in a more wasteful age." - Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars, 1993.
pdoege 6y ago
Yes, there are lots. Largest of which is that the manufacturers have to balance onerous return penalties vs. weight and size. The solution is to use a monocoque and glue everything down. Thus, consumers buy the cheapest plans, carriers push the costs onto the manufacturers, manufacturers push the costs back to the consumer for repairs, ad infinitum. There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers. Until consumers vote with their wallets or regulations the dynamic will not change.
- Reason077 6y ago
  Batteries also seem to be getting better in recent years, which reduces the need for them to be easily replaceable. With previous generations of iPhone, my battery was usually pretty much toast after 2 years of use. Greatly reduced battery life, random shutdowns at low battery charge, and in one case even swelling which pushed apart the phone's case. But I've had my current phone, an iPhone X, for almost 3 years now (since November 2017). The battery hardly seems to have degraded at all despite intensive use and daily charging. Battery status reports it still has 91% of original capacity, and that hasn't changed for a while.
- toast0 6y ago
  > There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers. It's hard to vote with my wallet on replacable batteries because I already have to vote on other issues. In today's market my priorities are 3-4GB of ram (which is insane, but that's what it takes to prevent my launcher from swapping out, and it's really frustrating when it's swapped out), 3.5mm headphone jack, and usb-c. Once you have those three things, I would prefer a removable battery, but whatever. Also, apparently you need to specify decent vibration, because motorola doesn't have it.
  - chaosharmonic 6y ago
    This. Mine are: display output, bootloader unlock, waterproofing. And that's maybe three good, current phones at any given time. Also, while a headphone jack would be great, once kernel-level support for ADC v3 is smoothed out (4.19 is the first LTS to have this, and has only started showing up on Android devices this year) my real dream is two USB ports.

eli 6y ago

California already has an ewaste fee added to devices, no? Or maybe that doesn’t cover phones.

dalbasal 6y ago
The operative part isn't the fee, it's the deposit. If it isn't profitable to recycle, you can make it profitable by making the fee reclaimable when it's recycled.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  Yup. That's what they do with lead and batteries and their core charge.
- aeternum 6y ago
  Should we make it artificially profitable to recycle? Recycling is often resource-intensive, we need to be careful we don't create a system in which we're using more energy and resources to recycle just to make ourselves feel good. It's quite possible that throwing all the used batteries in a dump now then digging them back out in the future once recycling tech has improved and raw resources become more scarce might be the best way to go. This cycle has already occurred with old electronics (companies are successfully mining garbage dumps for the gold connectors and traces).
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    "throwing all the used batteries in a dump now then digging them back out in the future once recycling tech has improved" The fact that there have been instances where this has occurred doesn't mean its a good plan. I agree that not all plans work out in retrospect, but neither does doing nothing. If we look at the balance of cases, we have done a lot more harm with a lack of environmental policies than we have with poor policies. Overall the mechanism is solid enough. If a product has EOL issues, a recycling deposit builds the solution into the initial price. It doesn't even need to be recycling. Could be safe disposal.

sukilot 6y ago

For the tiny fraction of people who need to change battery, just do the labor. Everyone else can enjoy a better phone until the OS is obsolete and the device is physically degraded.

on_and_off 6y ago
thinner maybe, better is subjective.
- cowsandmilk 6y ago
  Removable batteries of the same size have less life and need to be replaced more frequently. For a given volume of battery, no removable gives you longer life for a single use and a longer usable life in general before it needs to be replaced.
  - MAGZine 6y ago
    They're the same battery. Maybe packaged slightly differently, but being able to remove it does not affect it's ability to supply power.
    - samatman 6y ago
      "packaged slightly differently" has to mean "packaged durably enough to protect the bare battery from damage". By the very nature of the design constraint, a removable battery will take up more space inside a device than the same chemistry packaged without the protective case, springs to hold the contacts in place, and so on. That means by eschewing it, you can take your pick among: a thinner phone, more components, or a larger battery. There's no way around this.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > That means by eschewing it, you can take your pick among: a thinner phone, more components, or a larger battery. There's no way around this. That's making a lot of unstated assumptions. To start with, that the battery needed to consume all available space. The width and length of the phone are determined by the size of the screen, and a certain minimum depth is required to prevent this: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/apple-bendgate-internal-documents-iphone-6-plus https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/a... So then you have the dimensions of the phone already dictated by concerns other than the battery. At that point you could still use all of the available space for a battery, but if that's more battery capacity than you actually need, it makes the phone heavier. So you could very well already have some unused space inside the phone and not have any trade off with thickness at all, and in practice this is true for several phones that nonetheless have epoxied batteries. Moreover, even if the trade off you're describing exists for a given phone, that doesn't prove it's significant. Do we have to destroy the environment over a fraction of a millimeter?

late2part 6y ago

You said: 1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery How do you propose to mandate this?

WalterSear 6y ago
You make the sale of non-replaceable battery devices too onerous in California.
jedberg 6y ago
Create a law that says that if the battery is not user replaceable then the manufacturer must replace it for free when its charge capacity drops below 90% of its original capacity. That would shift the market pretty quickly towards user replaceable batteries.

avar 6y ago

> Add a very small tax to each device with such battery (in the order of cents) [and pay it] back to whoever brings the battery to a recycling plant. We do this with the likes of glass bottles and beverage cans and lot of them just end up in the trash. It only makes sense economically because consumers can bring them back in large batches, but even then the money you get back often doesn't justify the extra hassle economically. If you're going to raise the price until it does you've just recreated the cobra effect[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

mikepurvis 6y ago
I don't think it's really comparable; no one is going to be breeding batteries like cobras, regardless of the reward. Indeed, the comparison with bottle deposit programmes is apt— there are people in my city who rifle through blueboxes on the curb pulling out refundable items. Maybe this bothers some people, but it seems like a reasonable thing; you couldn't directly pay someone to do that work, but you can incentivize it to happen anyway, same as shopping carts get gathered up and returned by homeless people for a dollar a pop. If a token reward motivated people to scrounge disposed-of electronics pulling out lithium-ion batteries for return, that would be terrific!
- hansvm 6y ago
  That seems like exactly the wrong thing to incentivize. If it's in a blue bin it's going to be recycled like it's supposed to anyway -- you've just transferred a bit of wealth from people who buy bottles to people who rifle through recyclables. If we want a wealth transfer, can't we think of a better way to accomplish it?
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    Maybe for cans, but major brewers in Ontario use a small number of standard bottles, and when those come back through the return system, they are in fact pressure washed and refilled— a far more environmentally efficient process than sending them for general-stream glass recycling. I worked briefly at the Molson plant in Etobicoke and they literally have machines which cut apart skids of 12-pack boxes, wash off the old labels, all of it.

afrojack123 6y ago

Yep. I agree with this. I remember when cell phone batteries were easy to remove. Just take the cover off the back and put in a new one. However, this doesn't help the corporations sell more products.

dehrmann 6y ago
An iPhone is 3x thinner than a Nokia 3310, but has a battery with 3x the capacity of the 3310.
- ThePadawan 6y ago
  My Samsung Galaxy S3 had a thickness of of 8.6mm and a 2100mAh battery that was removable via the back cover [0]. My Samsung Galaxy S6 has a thickness of 6.8mm and a 2550mAh battery that requires unglueing to replace [1]. I'd much rather carry around the extra 1.8mm for the extra repairability. [0] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php [1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s6-6849.php https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s6-6849.php
  - afrojack123 6y ago
    True. I was unaware of this.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  And some variants of the 3310 claim a month of battery life. It isn’t an particularly fair comparison as they are very different devices that both get called ‘phones’, but that is a great battery life. https://thinkmarketingmagazine.com/new-nokia-3310-battery-life-31-days/ https://thinkmarketingmagazine.com/new-nokia-3310-battery-li...

05 6y ago

Use isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol to soften the glue.

jariel 6y ago

Sounds like some regulations are needed around high-value substances that are recyclable -> needs to be 'extractable'.

dehrmann 6y ago

> 1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery Apple has argued that they can fit a bigger, harder to remove battery into devices, and the added capacity because it's bigger makes up for it being hard to remove. I've changed batteries on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and it's very straightforward; I'm not sure how much truth there isn't to that argument on laptops. Phones are so small that I find that explanation more plausible.

shajznnckfke 6y ago
Maybe Apple could be given a choice here: user-replaceable battery with a refundable core charge, or they have to build a battery recycling program with the same sort of core charge applied at purchase. The core charge would be returned if the user sells the phone to any legit business (funded by the core charge originally paid to Apple). If the user sells the phone on eBay, the buyer can recover the core charge later, so it’s part of the market value of any phone that has a battery in it. The charge also could be recovered if the phone is given to a recycling center. It’s on Apple to figure out how to get the batteries out and pay whoever does that work. Apple can decide whether to do the engineering to make the battery replaceable up front, or fund the delicate labor of taking apart the phone later.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > or they have to build a battery recycling program with the same sort of core charge applied at purchase They will already recycle your battery for free. I think they will actually also recycle other manufacturers' batteries for free as well, and also any random loose batteries you hand them. Seems pretty reasonable to me?
  - shajznnckfke 6y ago
    I think the missing piece here is the core charge, which makes the average user think of the battery as something of value that shouldn’t just be thrown in the trash. Currently, I think a lot of users with an obsolete phone with a smashed screen would just throw it in the garbage.

hhjj 6y ago

While i agree laws are very welcome to fight those problems i think you should let capitalism do it work and implement laws more like: 1. Define recycling cost of product 2. Apply tax on cost Better recycling may not be equal to ease of replacement.

saxonww 6y ago

This is very similar to what's done today for car batteries in most of the US: you pay a deposit or core charge when buying a new battery, and it's refunded when you return the old one for recycling. https://batterycouncil.org/page/State_Recycling_Laws https://batterycouncil.org/page/State_Recycling_Laws

mmrezaie 6y ago
In Europe when you buy a battery you are already paying the tax for recycling, and places where they sell these batteries have to accept the dead batteries and send them for recycling.
- Spare_account 6y ago
  This is exactly what is described in Bestbuy three comments upthread, but in reality what is happening is the batteries are dumped in the trash. What _really_ happens to the batteries that you responsibly deposit in the recycling container at your local supermarket?
  - pacamara619 6y ago
    > What _really_ happens to the batteries that you responsibly deposit in the recycling container at your local supermarket? Whatever the manager wants to happen of course. Unless you actually check some places out, see how they handle recycling and hit them with a hefty fine if they don't do it properly.
  - Galanwe 6y ago
    Is it legal to dump batteries in the trash in the US? In France you could get a significant fine for that. If you throw other recyclables in regular bin, you would also get a warning the first time, and the workers would not pickup you trash after that if you continue. Not sure how they are incentivized to check the bins, but they do.
    - saxonww 6y ago

fsflover 6y ago

> Have you tried replacing a phone battery recently? It involves using hot air to soften the glue, a lot of manual labor, unplugging wires, and carefully replacing the battery. Not if you choose a company that cares about the environment: https://fairphone.com https://fairphone.com

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

can we do this plan, except make the well-financed corporates take care of the cost of cleaning up the toxic waste that they made?

mod 6y ago
No. The cost, of course, gets passed to the consumer, even if you want to call it something else.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  I bet they have better resources for finding and recovering their toxic waste after EOL than their customers.

brentonator 6y ago

It's kinda nice we don't have to worry about our phones dying if they get splashed or dropped in a pool though right? That has definitely cut down on a lot of waste.

grosswait 6y ago
Replaceable battery and waterproof are not mutually exclusive. Ref Samsung Galaxy Xcovee pro

hyperpallium2 6y ago

There's a related problem: for most phones with removable batteries, you can't buy replacements. And each model is carefully designed for a unique battery and terminal geometry. This doesn't prevent battery recycling, but it does junk the entire phone, which as you saynis harder to recycle. Mandate standardized batteries. (Perhaps antitrusting battery manufacture would achieve this automatically, since they'd make more money.) California has led this kind of change before, with citizen bills. C'mon California!

spullara 6y ago

No thanks.

agumonkey 6y ago

Oh man, the other day I found a bunch of early 2000s phones. It was such an odd feeling, so utilitarian. Fits your hand, absolutely not fragile.. and popping the back cover then removing the battery block require as less time as neurons. I was left dumbfounded for a second thinking how is that not better.

totalZero 6y ago

This sounds kind of reasonable if you're only optimizing for battery recycling, but in practice this kind of regulation would make the world worse. In other words, you want regulators to force phone companies to stop making thin, waterproof phones. It makes far more sense IMO to incentivize recycling/recovery for unwanted devices, and then harvest batteries in a professional facility rather than asking individuals to do it prior to recycling their devices. > You sit back and let the market sort out the details. You say this but you are suggesting the imposition of a very substantial regulation.