an old iPad that won't update anymore, an LG G4 with a

removable battery, a tablet from a Verizon promotional deal – this was

free – and an iPhone 8 with a very cracked screen.

I put a lot of things on OfferUp to give them a second life.

I also took some stuff to Best Buy for e-waste recycling.

I just couldn't believe how much tech trash I really had, especially

things like phones and tablets.

It seems like every tech company is trying to sell their product as

environmentally responsible.

That's why Apple claims its latest iPhone 12 lineup comes without a

charging block in the box.

Taken all together, the changes we've made for iPhone 12 cut over two

million metric tons of carbon emissions annually.

But that doesn't stop these companies from coming out with a host of new

phones every year, and the old ones end up in the drawer or a closet or a

box or worse end up in landfills.

In 2019, nearly 153 million smartphones were sold in North America, and in

2018, users were keeping their phones for about two years, but that time

period is likely to drop as folks upgrade to 5G-capable phones.

We don't have the technology to take a truck full of old iPhones, melt them

down, grind them up and make new iPhones out of them.

It is flat out physically impossible.

No one can do it. Apple can't do it.

Samsung can't do it. No one can do it.

Many of them are no longer made with screws.

They're made with glue.

Glue makes things very hard to take apart and recover materials from

because it degrades the value of the commodity product itself.

So smartphones and tablets are challenging.

About 6.9 million metric tons of waste was produced in the U.S.

alone in 2019.

That's about the same weight as nineteen Empire State Buildings.

Of that, only about 15 percent was collected for recycling.

And some of those minerals and metals being thrown away with our waste

aren't just valuable, they're toxic.

All of the arsenic, cadmium, lead, beryllium and other hazardous materials

that are contained in electronic waste should be kept out of landfills,

should be kept out of rivers and lakes, and also should be kept from being

dumped into emerging economies such as China, India or Africa.

Creating a phone that stayed relevant for four to five years instead of one

to two years could make a huge difference.

I'm frustrated with the world of technology journalism.

Every review of every product with an integrated battery should say this

product will stop working in eighteen months.

Until phones are made to last much longer, how can companies like Apple,

Google and Samsung fix the e-waste problem, and what can we as consumers

do to help?

We've created a pretty big mess for ourselves when it comes to e-waste.

The world created 53.6 million metric tons of waste in 2019, an average of

about 16 pounds per person.

That number is estimated to increase almost 40 percent by 2030.

And this is waste like old smartphone's has gold, iron, lead, copper and

other rare and potentially hazardous materials.

In fact, the raw materials in the waste thrown away in 2019 comes to about

57 billion dollars.

Less than 18 percent of that, about 10 billion dollars was recycled

properly. Many, but not all landfills leach into the ground when they're

rained upon. It's that leaching process that eventually degrades our

environment, ecosystem, vegetation, animals and gets back into our human

population.

Just to make one device takes a huge amount of raw materials, and that

mining process can be harmful to the environment.

It takes over two hundred pounds of raw material to make a phone like

this. These are one of the most environmentally destructive things that we

make because of all the materials that go into it.

Mining often uses large quantities of water, acids, other toxic or

costly reagents, and all of that presents an environmental challenge to be

able to mine responsibly.

Some of those mines can even dig up radioactive waste during the mining

process. This is the Mountain Pass Rare Earth mine outside of Las Vegas,

and it got shut down in the 1990s because they spilled radioactive waste

all over the valley floor outside of Las Vegas.

Over 100 companies, including Samsung and Apple, have signed on to the

Responsible Business Alliance Code of Conduct, which is a set of social,

environmental and ethical industry standards.

The problem is these companies keep making devices and we keep buying

them. In 2020, Apple released five new iPhones and Samsung released 15 new

phones. Apple reportedly sold about 196.2 million iPhones, and Samsung

sold about 296 million phones in 2019.

All told, an estimated 1.48 billion smartphones were sold worldwide in

2019. What do we do with these devices that whether they're new every two

or even obsolete every five, they do seem to become obsolete in a

relatively short timeframe.

In order to have a sustainable relationship with our technology, we have to

find a way to make only the products that we absolutely need and know

more. So once you've decided to part ways with your device, you could

throw it in a box like I used to do.

I don't recommend that.

But what if it's just a cracked screen or the battery runs out faster than

it used to? It should be easier to fix our phones.

That's where the Right to Repair movement comes in.

Right to Repair says, hey, if you're going to make a complex product, you

need to make parts, tools and information available to consumers.

Right? Farmers should have the right to fix their own tractors.

Consumers should have the right to fix their own iPhones.

Kyle Wiens started the popular repair site iFixit as a way to democratize

the process. Well, I was trying to fix my laptop and I couldn't find

information anywhere. I had dropped it on the power plug and it was a

little bit loose. And I learned that the repair manual had been online.

But Apple's lawyers had demanded that it be taken off the internet.

And that made me really mad.

Like, they have this information that could have made my life simpler and

they went out of their way to stop me from knowing how to work on my own

machine. Planned Obsolescence is the idea that a company strategically

slows down or otherwise makes it harder to use older devices.

Apple was just accused of this earlier in 2020.

Batteries are a consumable, they're a ware item and every manufacturer that

sells a product with a ware item should make replacements available.

You would not buy a car if the tires were welded to the car and there was

no way to change them.

Apple has made some changes over the years to make its phones more

repairable, like making some parts modular or using pull tabs instead of

glues for easy battery remove.

Unfortunately, Apple designs it for themselves to repair and not for

consumers to repair.

So they'll do things like put a proprietary screw on the bottom of the

phone that limits your access to it.

Luckily, companies like iFixit offer tools, guides and replacement parts

for phones, although Apple is not a huge fan of that.

There are certain battery and screen functions that only work if you get

your battery and screen replaced with Apple products by Apple certified

repair people. Many companies claim they want to repair products in-house

to maintain quality, and even Apple says it actually loses money in

repairs. Well, some of the things that Apple does is really compelling.

They're pushing their suppliers to use renewable energy is hugely

important. Most of the energy that goes into making this is fossil fuels

in China. It's mostly coal power making our phone.

But there are a lot of other things that Apple says, like they'll brag

about how much recycled material that they collect, that really is a red

herring. Apple has expanded its independent repair provider program to 140

businesses and 700 new locations, but it still believes that Apple

training is required for safe repairs.

As for Samsung, the world's second largest smartphone manufacturer, after

Huawei, its phones get even lower repairability scores than Apple from

iFixit's analysis.

We need to trust individuals to have some agency and not infantilize them

and say, oh, you could never turn a screwdriver.

I think that's just insulting.

And it might take federal regulation to truly force all involved to help

fix the problem.

Starting in January, you're going to see state legislatures across the

country from Massachusetts to California evaluating this issue.

And so if you're if you're interested, if you're passionate about it,

reach out to your legislator and tell them you support Right to Repair and

you'd like them to co-sponsor the bill.

If you can't fix your phone or donate it to someone who needs it, recycling

is a great option.

There were recyclers across the globe that process e-waste; GEEP in

Canada, Umicore in Belgium, and ERI, which processes an estimated five

percent of all e-waste recycled in the United States.

We got in it before there was an iPhone, before there was an iPad, before

Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize or an Academy Award for Inconvenient

Truth. In a nutshell, ERI receives electronic devices primarily from

consumers, businesses and original electronic manufacturers, or OEMs.

Consumers drop off their electronics at participating retail stores like

Best Buy and Staples, nonprofits like Salvation Army or at their local

solid waste authority.

Once the devices received, all of the data is destroyed, items are tested

for functionality, repaired, refurbished or processed into commodities

like steel, plastic, aluminum, copper, gold, silver, palladium and lead.

All of these materials that come out of ERI's facilities go to beneficial

reuse, like being made into new products and none go into landfills.

And Shegerian says they make a good business from this process.

We were profitable from the day we started.

17 years later we're still profitable.

And there's a lot of room for growth.

North America created 7.7 million metric tons of waste in 2019, and only

15 percent of that waste was documented to be collected and properly

recycled. All the materials that come out of it, the steel, the plastic,

the aluminum, the copper, the gold, the silver, the palladium, the lead is

all recyclable stuff, including the glass.

I mean, it all can go back for beneficial reuse.

None of this stuff ever had to go to landfill.

But this type of recycling isn't an option for every component in our

phones. Lithium ion batteries have to go through a special recycling

process and can be a fire hazard for recyclers.

Rare earth elements and magnets like the neodymium in our phone speakers

are harder to recycle, too, and many processes require toxic chemicals and

acids to separate materials.

If you are going to make one of rare earth elements, you should be ready to

produce almost 1.6 million gallons of waste gas that

contains hydrochloric acid.

And then you also think about the portion of that acid that goes into the

river and the sewage system, which was estimated to be near 53,000 gallons

for only one metric ton.

One option is to dismantle.

So which means you take this cellphone or the tablet and dismantle it and

then bring out the magnets.

But we all can agree that that's not efficient.

Ikenna Nlebedim's team has been working on a process to separate rare earth

materials from e-waste, like hard disk drives, electric motors and old

cell phones without the use of mineral acids or other environmentally

destructive chemicals that are used in other separation methods.

The process basically dissolves the rare earth containing materials in the

e-waste and leaves the rest to be collected and further recycled.

The recovered materials are more than 99 percent pure, and this process

can even recover cobalt when present, which isn't in demand element that

has been criticized for the way it's mined and sold.

The Ames Lab, where this process was developed, says it's ready to put it

into action and it has the support of the U.S.

Department of Energy to do so.

One thing about the process is that it works.

So if you give me a haptics drive today, I can give you the rare earth

content tomorrow or next or maybe in a week.

So what steps are being taken to minimize all of this e-waste?

When we got in the business approximately 17 or so years ago, there wasn't

a great call from the OEMs back then that we were involved with for our

plastics and metals to go back to them.

But now in 2020, the demand is huge.

Apple has dropped some recyclers who have unsustainable practices and

created robots to help disassemble and recycle about 1.2 million old