Zero Waste Coalition: Reducing our cell phone waste

By Christine Schultz

About the author: Christine Schultz is a Chelsea High School alum (2016) and recent graduate of the University of Michigan (2020), where she studied environmental science, statistics, and German. She has a passion for the environment, especially when it comes to reducing unnecessary waste. This article is adapted from her thesis, “Reducing E-Waste on Campus: An investigation of cell phone replacement and disposal among university students.”

She presented her research to the Chelsea Zero Waste Coalition during its May meeting.

Cell Phone Consumption
We have come a long way since the giant brick-shaped phone that was impossible to fit in your pocket, to the sleek new phones of today that are small computers. This rapidly changing technology creates a culture of consumption in the cell phone market.

Factors that promote this consumerist culture include marketing pressures, making people feel as though it’s fashionable to have the newest phone, constant demand from consumers for faster processing, more features and new phone styles, network providers with offers of limited one year warranties, two year contracts, and upgrade offers, and lastly, manufacturers producing cell phones that are difficult to take apart and made to break.

Cell phones are replaced so rapidly that they now have the shortest product lifetime of any electronic item, being replaced every 1-2 years on average. This level of consumption creates harmful e-waste and has negative effects on the environment.

E-Waste Impacts
One way to measure the impact that a cell phone has on the environment is through something called a life cycle assessment (LCA), which attempts to quantify the amount of carbon dioxide that is emitted into the atmosphere due to the life cycle of a cell phone.

Life cycle assessments include carbon that is emitted as a result of the mining for raw materials used to make a phone, the production processes, the transportation involved, the usage, and the end of life or disposal of a phone. It is approximated that a single cell phone emits around 120 kg of carbon dioxide in a life cycle spanning 3 years.

This is approximately equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted when driving a car 300 miles, or the amount of carbon dioxide that can be sequestered by 2 trees after 10 years of growth.

The production stage of a phone’s life is shown to have the largest impact in terms of carbon emissions. However, the disposal stage of a phone can be critical, too.

Phones contain very valuable, and also toxic, elements. If a phone isn’t disposed of properly it can harm the environment as well as humans. The valuable elements inside of a phone can be recycled and reused, saving the resources it would take to mine new elements.

Reclaiming these elements is critical as they are toxic, so when cell phones are thrown into landfills or not recycled properly, the elements can leach into the air and ground, negatively impacting ecosystems as well as possibly humans through groundwater contamination. The precious metals found in cell phones make them the most valuable electronic product in today’s waste stream, and considering their element of toxicity, you can see why it is vital that phones are disposed of properly.

Sadly, most phones aren’t. Only about 10 percent of phones are recycled, while most end up being stockpiled. This disconnect between students’ level of knowledge and the importance of proper phone disposal, as well as replacement behaviors, is the driving factor behind the research I did studying university students.

Research
My research was interested in looking at two different aspects of cell phone use among university students: their replacement behaviors and their disposal behaviors. To do this, I conducted a survey and distributed it around the University of Michigan campus.

The survey asked students questions about their past phone disposal methods, their frequency of replacement, who pays for their phone, their knowledge about e-waste and recycling, as well as their general environmental attitudes.

Conclusions
The results of the survey showed that there is indeed an issue with phone replacement and disposal behavior on campus, with students not understanding the negative impacts their phone decisions have on the environment as well as students not having knowledge of how to properly dispose of their old phone.

A majority of students reported owning at least one unused phone, demonstrating a behavior of stockpiling when instead those phones should be reused or recycled for materials. With the results from the survey, I concluded that since most students aren’t in charge of their own phone bill, they aren’t necessarily the one making decisions about replacement, so it will be more effective to target student’s disposal behavior.

The most efficient way to go about trying to change student’s disposal behavior seems to be through the help of university resources. Universities have a stake in how sustainable their campuses are, with sustainability goals they aim to meet.

By universities investing time and resources into changing students’ cell phone disposal behaviors, it could help to meet their sustainability goals, and help make an impact in the prevention of e-waste.

Are you interested in learning more about how you can reduce your cell phone footprint? Look for the second installment on this topic next week, in which we will talk about the factors behind our cell phone purchases and the options we have for repurposing and recycling them.