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That article is awfully short on estimating environmental impact. Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total

That article is awfully short on estimating environmental impact. Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total carbon impact is ~175 pounds of CO2, or about 9 gallons of gasoline. Which is roughly 0.25% of emissions from driving a car the average amount for four years. Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact than doubling the lifetimes of mobile phones.

akie 2y ago
Of course the tragedy is that we're doing neither.
- epistasis 2y ago
  I would argue that not lowering our car use drastically is a tragedy, and that our phone waste is a rounding error in comparison. And that the second tragedy is that so much media effort is spent focusing the public on rather meaningless phone waste rather than something meaningful like car use.
conradfr 2y ago
Does it takes into account all the things that a smartphone replaces, in both usage and hardware?
thaumaturgy 2y ago
Let's not define "environmental impact" solely in terms of carbon emissions and then do a trivial comparison to some mundane activity. Smartphones may have a low carbon emission footprint relative to some other things (numbers I found varied widely) and that still wouldn't be a good argument for discarding them unnecessarily. Their production and disposal has a great deal of other side effects that aren't defined by carbon emissions, including the mining and refining of rare metals. I would very much like to link a comprehensive examination of this here but I regret that I haven't got one in my bookmarks already and search results are being as useless as usual. If anyone else has a particularly great link to share I'd love to see it too.
- epistasis 2y ago
  You're definitely helping me prove my point, what are those other environmental impacts? Let's imagine we can stop a single car from needing to be produced: that will dwarf all the mining impacts from probably thousands of phones! Cars are soooo much worse along any angle you can possibly imagine, yet people are misdirected from their use of cars to worrying about miniscuke rounding errors from their phones.
  - immibis 2y ago
    so let's stop unnecessary cars and unnecessary phones
    - epistasis 2y ago
      The first step when doing optimization is to measure, so that one knows where efforts have significant results. I am arguing that our efforts should be in proportion to their payoff for environmental efforts as well. Or more precisely, we should spend our environmental efforts in ways that maximize their returns. Thus, here I am spending lots of time commenting on how a tiny minor change in driving habits will have bigger effects than large changes in phone habits. Urban planning in the US responds to the demands of the residents. We should be asking all residents demand alternatives to driving.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Urban planning in the US was a result of the oil lobby. It has nothing to do with the demands of residents except insofar as they were also brainwashed by the oil lobby.
        epistasis 2y ago
        It can't be limited to just the oil lobby, it was a general movement with lots of different proponents, not the least the car companies! In fact the car companies quite a bit more. But the urban planning establishment definitely adopted car-only infrastructure with gusto, without any direct oil or car money behind it.
xorcist 2y ago
Why is carbon emissions a suitable measurement of the environmental impact of electronic waste?
- epistasis 2y ago
  I am using it because it's the only impact that I see measured anywhere on electronic waste, and I have spent a fair amount of time trying to figure it out on my own. If you have a better quantification of species lost, of ecological diversity lost, of land lost, I would absolutely love to hear it, but I have not found anything better despite my research! Also, the environmental and ecological damage that we are facing from global warming is so utterly massive in comparison to all other ecological damage that we do, that any other avoided damage needs to be placed in the context of halting global warming. Humans will survive climate change, and a lot of other species will survive too, but the dieoff of species from it is so shocking that focusing on the small amounts of mining for phones in comparison to the massive amounts of mining and e-waste from cars seems, well, at best misguided. And if I'm being more honest, I think it's actually quite harmful to environmental action to focus any attention on phones when action on cars is so much more impactful.
eesmith 2y ago
"The use phase of a smartphone is not the most significant in the life cycle, in terms of [greenhouse gas] emissions", https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0909-4 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0909-4 , from 10 years ago. From https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Coolproducts-report.pdf https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Coolproducts-repo... (2019): "Our analysis shows that a 1-year lifetime extension of all smartphones in the EU would save 2.1 Mt CO2 per year by 2030, the equivalent of taking over a million cars off the roads. A lifetime extension of 3 years would save around 4.3 MtCO2. And a 5-year extension would correspond to about 5.5 MtCO2." The extra global warming contributions come from "manufacturing, transportation and end-of-life phases", and the increasing dependency on remote servers.
- epistasis 2y ago
  Exactly, it's the production of the phones where most of the carbon is generated. As for the comparisons there, it's hard to make head or tails of the meaning, because the "context" provided is apples to oranges. A million cars versus how many phones? Or a million cars versus how many cars in Europe? Citing a big number does not mean much unless we have something to compare that big number to, and I question the intentions of such "bald big numbers" because I see it so often used to muddy the waters and confuse people on many topics. For example, nuclear advocates will often disparage solar, talking about X million square kilometers without giving any context on whether that's actually a big number or not. 2.1Mt CO2 (over how many years with that "by 2030") versus how many Gt Co2 per year? Seems to be 2.5-3.1Gt/year based on a web search.. And what percentage of total EU emissions are from cars? These numbers also make the argument that phones are a small rounding error compared to other much bigger actions. Should we mandate repairability? Of course! It's good! But getting bent out of shape on the impact of phones compared to far more common and wasteful practices is a bad use of our limited amount of time to make drastic action. And the EU is far better on cars than the US, so perhaps it makes more sense for them to take action on phones, but in the US, our car addiction makes for far better and practical environmental action.
keybored 2y ago
> Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact than doubling the lifetimes of mobile phones. Urban planning too obviously cannot be pinned on consumer choices. Which is why it would never become the locus of attention. I don’t know if you are right or wrong about this point. But nonetheless.
- epistasis 2y ago
  > cannot be pinned on consumer choices. Which is why it would never become the locus of attention. Can you explain your reasoning here? I think you are saying that we focus all of our environmental action through the lens of consumer choice, which is something that I also think is true. We can encourage the public to make better individual choices, but a far better approach is to change the system so that the default choice is the best choice. But when it comes to phones, a lot of the policy action seems to be set on forcing companies to behave in a certain way, which IMHO is perfectly cromulent if the environmental payoff is proprotionate to the effort. My focus has been on changing the attitudes towards policy changes that broaden the choices of individuals, to allow them to even choose a better path that is not currently available, because urban planning has banned walkable neighborhoods in nearly every part of every city.
antasvara 2y ago
There are a lot of carbon emissions from a variety of sources. Coal fired power generates more CO2 in the US than all US automobiles combined. Does that mean we should completely ignore automobiles and focus on coal power? Focusing on the "smallest" problem at the expense of the "biggest" is the wrong approach. But ignoring small problems that are easier to fix is also the wrong approach. The author is using a phone that is more than 6 years old and still functions; making it easier to continue using it feels like an easier problem than changing urban planning.
- epistasis 2y ago
  Coal is a dead man walking, not just in the US, but around the world. Systematic market forces have eliminated any financial advantage to coal. China uses it to fill in for gaps in renewables, but has very low capacity factors for their plants. IMHO we should spend lobbying efforts on the things that will have greater effects, like approving apartment buildings in walkable areas. I agree with your assessment that we should change what we can and should optimize how we spend our time creating change, but IMHO the best possible outcome of advocating for phone change is that people think "hey yeah let's change this," but then get told "oh so you are OK with that change, how about something far far bigger for small effort?" We seriously only need to do very small changes to urban planning to effect massive change compared to phones. And those small changes have the effect of growing. And they are necessary urban planning changes, and the longer we put them off the less likely we can have the snowball rolling where we need it to be.

akie 2y ago

Of course the tragedy is that we're doing neither.

epistasis 2y ago
I would argue that not lowering our car use drastically is a tragedy, and that our phone waste is a rounding error in comparison. And that the second tragedy is that so much media effort is spent focusing the public on rather meaningless phone waste rather than something meaningful like car use.

conradfr 2y ago

Does it takes into account all the things that a smartphone replaces, in both usage and hardware?

thaumaturgy 2y ago

Let's not define "environmental impact" solely in terms of carbon emissions and then do a trivial comparison to some mundane activity. Smartphones may have a low carbon emission footprint relative to some other things (numbers I found varied widely) and that still wouldn't be a good argument for discarding them unnecessarily. Their production and disposal has a great deal of other side effects that aren't defined by carbon emissions, including the mining and refining of rare metals. I would very much like to link a comprehensive examination of this here but I regret that I haven't got one in my bookmarks already and search results are being as useless as usual. If anyone else has a particularly great link to share I'd love to see it too.

epistasis 2y ago
You're definitely helping me prove my point, what are those other environmental impacts? Let's imagine we can stop a single car from needing to be produced: that will dwarf all the mining impacts from probably thousands of phones! Cars are soooo much worse along any angle you can possibly imagine, yet people are misdirected from their use of cars to worrying about miniscuke rounding errors from their phones.
- immibis 2y ago
  so let's stop unnecessary cars and unnecessary phones
  - epistasis 2y ago
    The first step when doing optimization is to measure, so that one knows where efforts have significant results. I am arguing that our efforts should be in proportion to their payoff for environmental efforts as well. Or more precisely, we should spend our environmental efforts in ways that maximize their returns. Thus, here I am spending lots of time commenting on how a tiny minor change in driving habits will have bigger effects than large changes in phone habits. Urban planning in the US responds to the demands of the residents. We should be asking all residents demand alternatives to driving.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Urban planning in the US was a result of the oil lobby. It has nothing to do with the demands of residents except insofar as they were also brainwashed by the oil lobby.
      - epistasis 2y ago
        It can't be limited to just the oil lobby, it was a general movement with lots of different proponents, not the least the car companies! In fact the car companies quite a bit more. But the urban planning establishment definitely adopted car-only infrastructure with gusto, without any direct oil or car money behind it.

xorcist 2y ago

Why is carbon emissions a suitable measurement of the environmental impact of electronic waste?

epistasis 2y ago
I am using it because it's the only impact that I see measured anywhere on electronic waste, and I have spent a fair amount of time trying to figure it out on my own. If you have a better quantification of species lost, of ecological diversity lost, of land lost, I would absolutely love to hear it, but I have not found anything better despite my research! Also, the environmental and ecological damage that we are facing from global warming is so utterly massive in comparison to all other ecological damage that we do, that any other avoided damage needs to be placed in the context of halting global warming. Humans will survive climate change, and a lot of other species will survive too, but the dieoff of species from it is so shocking that focusing on the small amounts of mining for phones in comparison to the massive amounts of mining and e-waste from cars seems, well, at best misguided. And if I'm being more honest, I think it's actually quite harmful to environmental action to focus any attention on phones when action on cars is so much more impactful.

eesmith 2y ago

"The use phase of a smartphone is not the most significant in the life cycle, in terms of [greenhouse gas] emissions", https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0909-4 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-0909-4 , from 10 years ago. From https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Coolproducts-report.pdf https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Coolproducts-repo... (2019): "Our analysis shows that a 1-year lifetime extension of all smartphones in the EU would save 2.1 Mt CO2 per year by 2030, the equivalent of taking over a million cars off the roads. A lifetime extension of 3 years would save around 4.3 MtCO2. And a 5-year extension would correspond to about 5.5 MtCO2." The extra global warming contributions come from "manufacturing, transportation and end-of-life phases", and the increasing dependency on remote servers.

epistasis 2y ago
Exactly, it's the production of the phones where most of the carbon is generated. As for the comparisons there, it's hard to make head or tails of the meaning, because the "context" provided is apples to oranges. A million cars versus how many phones? Or a million cars versus how many cars in Europe? Citing a big number does not mean much unless we have something to compare that big number to, and I question the intentions of such "bald big numbers" because I see it so often used to muddy the waters and confuse people on many topics. For example, nuclear advocates will often disparage solar, talking about X million square kilometers without giving any context on whether that's actually a big number or not. 2.1Mt CO2 (over how many years with that "by 2030") versus how many Gt Co2 per year? Seems to be 2.5-3.1Gt/year based on a web search.. And what percentage of total EU emissions are from cars? These numbers also make the argument that phones are a small rounding error compared to other much bigger actions. Should we mandate repairability? Of course! It's good! But getting bent out of shape on the impact of phones compared to far more common and wasteful practices is a bad use of our limited amount of time to make drastic action. And the EU is far better on cars than the US, so perhaps it makes more sense for them to take action on phones, but in the US, our car addiction makes for far better and practical environmental action.

keybored 2y ago

> Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact than doubling the lifetimes of mobile phones. Urban planning too obviously cannot be pinned on consumer choices. Which is why it would never become the locus of attention. I don’t know if you are right or wrong about this point. But nonetheless.

epistasis 2y ago
> cannot be pinned on consumer choices. Which is why it would never become the locus of attention. Can you explain your reasoning here? I think you are saying that we focus all of our environmental action through the lens of consumer choice, which is something that I also think is true. We can encourage the public to make better individual choices, but a far better approach is to change the system so that the default choice is the best choice. But when it comes to phones, a lot of the policy action seems to be set on forcing companies to behave in a certain way, which IMHO is perfectly cromulent if the environmental payoff is proprotionate to the effort. My focus has been on changing the attitudes towards policy changes that broaden the choices of individuals, to allow them to even choose a better path that is not currently available, because urban planning has banned walkable neighborhoods in nearly every part of every city.

antasvara 2y ago

There are a lot of carbon emissions from a variety of sources. Coal fired power generates more CO2 in the US than all US automobiles combined. Does that mean we should completely ignore automobiles and focus on coal power? Focusing on the "smallest" problem at the expense of the "biggest" is the wrong approach. But ignoring small problems that are easier to fix is also the wrong approach. The author is using a phone that is more than 6 years old and still functions; making it easier to continue using it feels like an easier problem than changing urban planning.

epistasis 2y ago
Coal is a dead man walking, not just in the US, but around the world. Systematic market forces have eliminated any financial advantage to coal. China uses it to fill in for gaps in renewables, but has very low capacity factors for their plants. IMHO we should spend lobbying efforts on the things that will have greater effects, like approving apartment buildings in walkable areas. I agree with your assessment that we should change what we can and should optimize how we spend our time creating change, but IMHO the best possible outcome of advocating for phone change is that people think "hey yeah let's change this," but then get told "oh so you are OK with that change, how about something far far bigger for small effort?" We seriously only need to do very small changes to urban planning to effect massive change compared to phones. And those small changes have the effect of growing. And they are necessary urban planning changes, and the longer we put them off the less likely we can have the snowball rolling where we need it to be.