3 ms·

Your story is appalling, and I agree that this is a major problem. However, drowning in e-waste from smartphones is many orders of magnitude from being an issu

by kragen 1y ago

Your story is appalling, and I agree that this is a major problem. However, drowning in e-waste from smartphones is many orders of magnitude from being an issue, as trivial calculations easily show. Mentioning it makes your argument rhetorically much weaker. The iPhone 16 is 147.6mm × 71.6mm × 7.8mm (8.2 × 10⁻⁵ m³) and weighs 170g, according to https://www.dimensions.com/element/apple-iphone-16-18th-gen https://www.dimensions.com/element/apple-iphone-16-18th-gen. The population of France is 68.6 million people. One iPhone per person each year for the next century would be 6.86 billion iPhones in France, assuming the population remained constant. This would weigh 1.2 million tonnes and fit in a sphere 51 meters in diameter. If stacked 6 meters deep it would cover 9.4 hectares, a circle 340 meters in diameter. France contains 63 million hectares. The hypothetical pile of iPhones would cover about a third of the area of the Gravelines Nuclear Power Station near Calais. Far from drowning in e-waste from smartphones, if you dump it in a landfill, it will be extremely hard even to find the e-waste without a map. Even if you didn't have a countryside to bury e-waste in, this should be obvious even on the household scale. Suppose you and your four children each get a new iPhone every year, and instead of throwing them away, you put them in a box in the attic. How big is the box? It's a 35 cm cube after 100 years. It would weigh 85 kg, though, so you'd want to use several smaller boxes. But there is no risk of drowning.

rixed 1y ago
"Drowning in e-waste" was a metaphor for "slowly destroying the conditions for civilisation with the violent obsession for more fossil fuel and more minerals to extract".
- kragen 1y ago
  That's a bad metaphor, because those problems don't have anything significant in common with the e-waste problem, but there is no particular danger of smartphones being a major contributor to them, either. According to https://www.apple.com/nz/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPhone_16_and_iPhone_16_Plus_PER_Sept2024.pdf https://www.apple.com/nz/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPh... the emissions per iPhone 16 are 56 kg of CO₂ equivalent, 18% of which is the expected energy consumption during the life of the product. France emits 4.14 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year, so buying an extra iPhone per year would increase your total yearly CO₂ (equivalent) emissions by about 1%. Similarly, the quantity of minerals in a smartphone is insignificant (170 grams! largely recycled!) compared with the quantity of minerals in, for example, a sidewalk (many tonnes). Some of those minerals, like the gold in the bond wires, are pretty heavily refined, requiring the excavation of some much larger amount of gangue and leaving most of it as tailings. But the total quantities of those minerals in the device are very small indeed. Instead, worry about things like electric vehicles and CO₂ emissions from making concrete. What you are doing by attempting to reduce fossil fuel and other mineral usage by buying smartphones less frequently is analogous to attempting to pay the rent on a Paris apartment by looking for lost coins in the subway station, or attempting to take a running leap across the English Channel. You are doomed by your complete lack of understanding of the orders of magnitude involved.
  - rixed 1y ago
    e-waste is very much linked with over-production, of which any particular product taken in isolation, be it iphone or tomatoes, is of course insignificant, the issue being the economy at large not iphones or Apple. I don't know what's your point exactly? I was close to believe that this near perfect mix of naive quotation from Apple PR BS, computation of tons of minerals required to build a phone to the 5th decimal, and the lackadaisical insulting remarks, was some refined form of humor. But given we are on HN, you might just be this kind of engineer who can't see the forest for the tree. So, assuming you are just inapropriately expressing a genuine concern that I might be mislead into believing that refraining oneself from buying any more phones is going to slow our society spiraling down into chaos, rest assured: I'm not believing this. My posture is all about principles, and holds for an iphone like for any of the many useless things a normal, modern life wants us to consume routinely, because I believe one should try to do the right thing no matter what, regardless of the odds of success, because proceeding otherwise requires to define success, an end goal, and that's a circular impossibility. Yes, as you can see, I'm with you on the spectrum. :-)
    - kragen 1y ago
      I am an engineer, and engineering is what is going to keep the planet habitable, not self-sacrifice. Engineering is based on calculating the costs and benefits of tradeoffs. I do respect self-sacrifice on principled grounds. If you were starving in a besieged city, and killing and eating a baby were your best chance for survival (https://youtu.be/KOkBEqtGUI8?t=2886 https://youtu.be/KOkBEqtGUI8?t=2886), I'd endorse you not doing it. Even if, in some utilitarian calculus, you were more important than the baby, I'd endorse your hypothetical non-baby-eating moral choice. I'd like to think that I'd be one of the people abstaining from lifesaving cannibalism myself, though I've often seen people fail to uphold their principles when it comes down to it. I respect drawing a line in the sand beyond which you refuse to coldly weigh costs and benefits like an engineer. But that's not what you're doing. If not buying a smartphone were "all about principles" to you, you wouldn't have a smartphone in the first place. You've crossed the line in the sand; you're already eating babies. All that remains to you is balancing the number of babies you kill and eat against your nourishment. And, in that situation, refusing to balance costs and benefits isn't a matter of principle. It's merely irresponsibility, and will result in you eating unnecessary quantities of babies.

by kragen 1y ago

rixed 1y ago

"Drowning in e-waste" was a metaphor for "slowly destroying the conditions for civilisation with the violent obsession for more fossil fuel and more minerals to extract".

kragen 1y ago
That's a bad metaphor, because those problems don't have anything significant in common with the e-waste problem, but there is no particular danger of smartphones being a major contributor to them, either. According to https://www.apple.com/nz/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPhone_16_and_iPhone_16_Plus_PER_Sept2024.pdf https://www.apple.com/nz/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPh... the emissions per iPhone 16 are 56 kg of CO₂ equivalent, 18% of which is the expected energy consumption during the life of the product. France emits 4.14 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year, so buying an extra iPhone per year would increase your total yearly CO₂ (equivalent) emissions by about 1%. Similarly, the quantity of minerals in a smartphone is insignificant (170 grams! largely recycled!) compared with the quantity of minerals in, for example, a sidewalk (many tonnes). Some of those minerals, like the gold in the bond wires, are pretty heavily refined, requiring the excavation of some much larger amount of gangue and leaving most of it as tailings. But the total quantities of those minerals in the device are very small indeed. Instead, worry about things like electric vehicles and CO₂ emissions from making concrete. What you are doing by attempting to reduce fossil fuel and other mineral usage by buying smartphones less frequently is analogous to attempting to pay the rent on a Paris apartment by looking for lost coins in the subway station, or attempting to take a running leap across the English Channel. You are doomed by your complete lack of understanding of the orders of magnitude involved.
- rixed 1y ago
  e-waste is very much linked with over-production, of which any particular product taken in isolation, be it iphone or tomatoes, is of course insignificant, the issue being the economy at large not iphones or Apple. I don't know what's your point exactly? I was close to believe that this near perfect mix of naive quotation from Apple PR BS, computation of tons of minerals required to build a phone to the 5th decimal, and the lackadaisical insulting remarks, was some refined form of humor. But given we are on HN, you might just be this kind of engineer who can't see the forest for the tree. So, assuming you are just inapropriately expressing a genuine concern that I might be mislead into believing that refraining oneself from buying any more phones is going to slow our society spiraling down into chaos, rest assured: I'm not believing this. My posture is all about principles, and holds for an iphone like for any of the many useless things a normal, modern life wants us to consume routinely, because I believe one should try to do the right thing no matter what, regardless of the odds of success, because proceeding otherwise requires to define success, an end goal, and that's a circular impossibility. Yes, as you can see, I'm with you on the spectrum. :-)
  - kragen 1y ago
    I am an engineer, and engineering is what is going to keep the planet habitable, not self-sacrifice. Engineering is based on calculating the costs and benefits of tradeoffs. I do respect self-sacrifice on principled grounds. If you were starving in a besieged city, and killing and eating a baby were your best chance for survival (https://youtu.be/KOkBEqtGUI8?t=2886 https://youtu.be/KOkBEqtGUI8?t=2886), I'd endorse you not doing it. Even if, in some utilitarian calculus, you were more important than the baby, I'd endorse your hypothetical non-baby-eating moral choice. I'd like to think that I'd be one of the people abstaining from lifesaving cannibalism myself, though I've often seen people fail to uphold their principles when it comes down to it. I respect drawing a line in the sand beyond which you refuse to coldly weigh costs and benefits like an engineer. But that's not what you're doing. If not buying a smartphone were "all about principles" to you, you wouldn't have a smartphone in the first place. You've crossed the line in the sand; you're already eating babies. All that remains to you is balancing the number of babies you kill and eat against your nourishment. And, in that situation, refusing to balance costs and benefits isn't a matter of principle. It's merely irresponsibility, and will result in you eating unnecessary quantities of babies.