Bringing Old Phones Back To Life

Recently I was confronted by ads to upgrade my phone to the Samsung S21. I currently have the nearly identical S20 phone, so upgrading would yield minimal benefits ... yet I can't help wanting the new phone. We have been conditioned to think this way.

Put aside the laughable reality that a phone released just a dozen years ago is already on version 21. (In comparison, Microsoft Windows has been around since 1985 and has only made it up to version 11 so far). The pace of change has been so fast, that it feels like a year is a reasonable amount of time for a $1000+ device to be obsolete. It isn't.

Thankfully, there is a global movement to help recycle “old” devices that have been replaced with a shinier new pretty-much-the-same device. Unfortunately, recycling will never be enough. If we keep incentivizing device manufacturers to launch a new model of phone every year to replace the last one, this treadmill of waste will continue indefinitely.

So how do we solve this? One place to start may be to hold on to your device for longer. Another would be to make sure that when you do trade in your phone, that it will be resold or reused instead of thrown away. The solution to e-waste starts with caring more about what happens to your phone after you abandon it for something better.