Shorter lifetimes and increased obsolescence
There are a number of reasons for shorter lifetimes and increased obsolescence of electronics (Cooper, 2016). In particular, rapid technological developments mean that models become obsolete quickly either in the eyes of the consumers or because the hardware is no longer compatible with updated software. Marketing-induced obsolescence also encourages the purchase of new models that may offer only minor improvements on existing models. Other drivers of consumer demand include: a decline in the quality of many products; consumer demand for the latest design, technology, or increased energy efficiency of new products. Repair options for many electronics are also limited either because the design does not allow easy repair or because repair costs are high compared to buying a new product. The result is that electronics that could be repaired are often discarded. However, repair services for electronics are growing within the EU both for business to business and end consumers.
Environmental and climate impacts from electronics
Environmental and climate impacts from electronics include those arising from material use, emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases, chemicals use and waste in particular. In complex electronic equipment up to 60 separate chemical elements can be found. There are also very significant environmental and social impacts from the extraction and use of these materials including from mining and production of copper, critical raw materials (CRMs) and rare earth elements (REE) as well as from metals, such as tantalum, plastics and glass. Impacts include contributing to resource scarcity, water use, and pollution from chemicals.
Smartphones
Smartphones came onto the market in the late 1990s and gained huge worldwide popularity with the launch of the iPhone in 2007 (Statista, 2018). Globally, over 1.5 billion smartphones are sold annually (Statista, 2019a). They are very often replaced before they are broken. The most common reasons for replacing a smartphone—on average after less than two years (Cordella et al., 2019)—are that consumers want to have the latest model, marketing-induced obsolescence or because the existing phone is not functioning properly, most often related to broken screens, battery lifetime or operating system problems (Cordella et al., 2019; Watson et al., 2017).
When looking at the lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from smartphones, studies show a wide range of estimated total GHG ranging from 16 to 110 kg CO2 equivalents for different models, which is a relatively moderate amount (Manhart et al., 2016). It is the very large total product volume that causes, aggregately, high environmental and climate impacts, mostly from manufacturing, but also from charging and use. From an environmental and climate perspective, smartphones should be kept and used for longer.