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Mobile Phones

When the first mobile phone hit the market in 1983 for high-end business users, these devices were only used to make and receive telephone calls. Since then, they have morphed into hybrid devices that perform multiple functions, such as text messaging, e-mail, Internet browsing, music playback, radio, GPS, and gaming. Since their introduction, rapid advances in mobile technology have made these devices cheaper and more accessible to increasing numbers of people around the world. By the end of 2010, there were more than 76 cellular phone subscriptions per 100 people on the planet.

Today, the world's largest mobile network in the world is China Mobile, with over 500 million subscribers, and China alone manufactures nearly 600 million mobile phones annually. As with other forms of electronics, though, access to mobile phones is uneven: for every 100 people in the developed world, there are 116 cellular phone subscriptions, whereas in the developing world the figure is just over 67.

Practices of consuming and wasting mobile phones vary from place to place in culturally distinctive ways. In North America, it is increasingly common for such objects to be more about social distinction than use value. In the constant search for distinction afforded by such devices to their users, increasing rates of turnover and discard are caused. These are highly situated practices and it would be a mistake to understand them as universal. In Africa and Asia, mobile phones are consumed quite differently, while also being symbols of status. In these regions, the devices tend to have considerably longer useful lives and their basic functions, such as text messaging, are used in a much broader range of applications than they currently are in North America. For example, in Kenya and India, in lieu of widely available bank accounts, mobile phones are used to send and receive payments for everything from wages to purchases of daily sundries. Although around the world tens of millions of phones are disposed of annually, they do not necessarily end up as waste. Instead, they may continue to circulate in substantial recovery economies that include transnational commodity networks of trade and traffic.

Disposal Practices

As with the consumption of mobile phones, disposal practices vary widely. In Japan, for example, mobile phones are one of many inanimate objects that may receive formal mortuary rites once they have reached the end of their useful lives for their owners. In Canada and the United States, it is common for mobile phone consumers to have multiple mobile phones in storage awaiting some later decision about how best to be rid of the devices. North Americans and Europeans increasingly have access to formal recycling systems for mobile phones and other electronics.

Elsewhere in Asia and Africa, mobile phones circulate within complex informal recovery economies that refurbish, repair, and remanufacture mobile phones and other electronics as well as disassemble them into their constituent components and materials that are then fed back into the production economy.

The disposal and recovery of mobile phones is far from being a closed-loop system. Efforts to manage waste mobile phones emphasize industrial-scale recycling. In North America, Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa, these kinds of strategies are increasingly mandated by law. At the same time, just as more jurisdictions enact such legislation, there is serious debate around what these laws can actually accomplish. Industrial-scale recycling can recover substantial amounts of material and energy and reduce the need for mining new raw materials, yet industrial-scale recycling has its own impacts. For example, transportation for recycling over substantial distances adds carbon emissions and thus increases the overall impact of disposed mobile phones. Some parts of the recycling chain, such as smelting for metal and energy recovery, have their own risks of toxic emissions. Most contentious is what some call the recycling trap, which describes the consequences of forgoing a multitude of options for the clean(er) production of original products in favor of recycling them as an alternative to disposal. The recycling trap risks implementing a recycling system to deal with mobile phone waste only after such waste has already been created, rather than reducing or eliminating the production of such waste in the first place.

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