Mobile phone manufacturers and the environment would both benefit from producing less-complex phones that
use “the cloud” — a network of remote servers connected to the Internet — to carry out power-intensive tasks, researchers say. The current business model encourages consumers to upgrade devices frequently with little incentive to recycle them, researchers write in the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. There are roughly 85 million unused phones in the U.K. alone, the researchers note, and replacing the gold they contain — not to mention copper, silver, and other rare metals — would cost nearly $170 million and release an equivalent of 84,000 tons of CO2. Moving to a “cloud-based” system where heavy computing is done on remote servers would allow manufacturers to produce less-complex phones that are designed to last longer and require fewer valuable metals, the analysis found.
Millions of unused phones are discarded each year.