With 1.5 billion smart phones sold annually, it’s estimated that nearly as many are deactivated within that same time frame. The end-of-the-line for many of these outmoded smartphones is a junk drawer or a storage box in the garage. But while these devices languish out-of-sight, out-of-mind, their processors could run faultlessly for more than 10 years. That means smartphones are routinely retired after expending just 25% of their functional lifespan.
Can smartphones be given a second life? If so, a second and more perplexing question must be considered, too: how can smartphones be repurposed without doing more environmental harm than good These are the issues researchers from UC San Diego’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) are tackling. PhD student and first author Jennifer Switzer, along with her coauthors CSE professors Ryan Kastner and Pat Pannuto and PhD student Gabriel Marcano, has proposed a promising strategy to target smartphone waste in the paper Junkyard Computing: Repurposing Discarded Smartphones to Minimize Carbon.
“It takes a spectacular amount of energy to manufacture modern, high-performance computer technology. The paper explores how to make computing more sustainable by finding new uses for devices society has already paid the carbon cost to manufacture,” said Pannuto. For many years, the EPA has encouraged consumers to recycle their deactivated smartphones. Their data suggests that for every million smartphones recycled, more than 35 thousand pounds of copper can be recovered along with smaller amounts of silver, gold and palladium. These and other raw materials can be used to produce new consumer goods such as automotive parts, jewelry, garden furniture and batteries.