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Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 Recall Is an Environmental Travesty (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Lost in the hype about Samsung permanently pulling the plug on its exploding phone is this: The failure of the Galaxy Note 7 is an environmental tragedy, regardless of what Samsung decides will happen to the 2.5 million devices it manufactured. Early Tuesday morning, Samsung announced it has permanently discontinued and stopped promoting the Galaxy Note 7, and has asked its customers to return their devices for a refund or exchange. A Samsung spokesperson told me the phones will not be repaired, refurbished, or resold ever again: "We have a process in place to safely dispose of the phones," the company said. There are two main things to consider here: First, though smartphones weigh less than a pound, it was estimated in 2013 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers estimated that it takes roughly 165 pounds of raw mined materials to make the average cell phone, a number that is certainly higher for the Note 7, being both one of the largest and most advanced smartphones phones ever created. Second, much of that mined material is going to be immediately lost. This is because we are terrible at recycling smartphones -- of the 50-or-so elements that are in a Galaxy Note 7, we can only recover about a dozen of them through recycling. Lost are most of the rare earth elements, which are generally the most environmentally destructive and human labor-intensive to mine. This loss of material is why smartphones are not usually recycled even several years into their lifespans -- they are refurbished and resold to cell phone insurance companies and customers in developing markets. This is because the recoverable elements within any given smartphone are only worth a couple bucks; it is far more environmentally sustainable and more profitable to extend the life of a smartphone than it is to disassemble it and turn it into something else. There is a potential silver lining here: Just as oil spills give scientists an opportunity to try out new cleanup techniques, a large-scale smartphone recall may allow us to learn more about how to recycle smartphones.
Oh you environmental wack jobs. Next you'll be saying that maybe sending out asbestos lined boxes to return the phones wasn't a good idea.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Nobody makes or gets any more phones, from any company.
All of them have environmental impact from manufacturing and disposal.
Are we going to be logically consistent, or are we going for the web site clicks and/or "rent seeking" of being where Samsung sends the "environmental penalty checks"?
We have to find a way to make recycling of electronics profitable. It's a disaster that so many millions of electronic devices are discarded each year without recovering most of their materials.
Specially bad is in the case of the smartphones which most people replace within two years and have experienced huge growth in the last few years. Nowadays fewer and fewer PCs are built and people keep them for much longer than before. I hope that smartphones go in that direction too although I'm not optimistic about that since in my experience they seem to fail much earlier than PCs
Use them for VR, turn them into SBCs, sell them as USB-powered dev kits... there's plenty of uses for such a marvel of technology that do not require an onboard battery.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
the rate we purchase new phones, when the ones we have already are more than adequate, is a bigger travesty. so the note 7 had an accelerated eol, i think if people should be more concerned with the motto we learned when we were young, reduce/reuse/recycle, and actually do that instead of "oh new shiny, must get" fucking people
The saddest part about this rag's hackjob isn't that it's necessarily false; just that it uses the environmental concerns of electronics as a club for fanboy-on-fanboy shitflinging clicks.
The failure of the Galaxy Note 7 is an environmental tragedy, regardless of what Samsung decides will happen to the 2.5 million devices it manufactured.
Some vague googling gave me this: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/28/billion-smartphones_n_4679082.html
Research firm IDC said that Samsung was the world's biggest producer of smartphones, having sold 31.3% of the 1.004 billion smartphones shipped worldwide.
It's a rounding error.
Perhaps they can "store" them right next to all of those ET cartridges in New Mexico.
If they aggregate millions of identical phones and ship them by the pallet load to India/China/CheapLaborVille, I suspect it can become economical to recycle most of the goods. This is especially true if the people doing it aren't concerned with pesky OSHA type regulations from an overbearing government concerned with foolish things like employee health.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
+1 True
The fact that they can't determine why these phones are going up in smoke is scary. In a way it's understandable; the ones that do end up exploding burn up so there's no system logs or other evidence that could be checked to determine the cause.
And don't think that we are immune if we use non-Samsung phones. It's probably only a matter of time before Apple, LG, or some other manufacturer has a similar problem, and also can't figure it out because of the total destruction involved. A lot of energy density is being packed into a tiny space.
I'd be curious to know what will actually happen in this case.
Clearly Samsung can't sell these as-is anymore; but by all reports the problem is with the battery(or possibly with the case not protecting the battery properly); not the logic board or the screen. Given that, it seems crazy to be talking about recycling them(even if we had nearly perfect methods), when the most expensive components are still fully functional.
I imagine that market-cannibalization/brand dilution/etc. concerns might interfere; but Samsung(or a 3rd party, if Samsung wants the result debranded and not associated with them); could pretty much just rip the back cover off; swap in a somewhat bigger and uglier, but non-explosive, battery; put a suitably enlarged cover back on and have the thing ready to go. If they didn't mess with the RF section, they might even be able to reuse FFC and similar certification.
Yes, the resulting product would be less valuable than the Note 7(if it could still be sold); but it would be worth a great deal more than even a perfect recovery of the constituent elements; and by the look of the teardown you could rework to remove the offending battery without damaging the PCBs or the screen with relatively little labor.
Even if perfect recycling existed, why would you grind up something like this? There's a Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of flash, and a 2560x1440 display in there; all perfectly fine. Surely CAD-ing up a new backplate and swapping the battery to produce a saleable phone is markedly more profitable than just breaking it down?
They won't clog up the landfills. They'll burn them down.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I would think that Samsung, which makes a huge range of products, could find one where they could integrate the failed tablets after removing the battery. People have talked about integrating touch screens with refrigerators. Now that can at minimal cost. Or turn them into hard-wired wall-mounted touch screens. I would love to see them for all the conference rooms at my office, set to display who has reserved the room and for how long.
The point is that there are all kinds of things these could be used for without the exploding batteries.
We could always burn the cellphones if there isn't space in the landfill.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Apple has a massive recycling operation for smartphones and could be contracted to process them.
Like something that resembles a diet coke and mentos video, line em up with some type of rube goldberg configuration and video tape what happens when one of them explodes!
The fact that they can't determine why these phones are going up in smoke is scary. In a way it's understandable; the ones that do end up exploding burn up so there's no system logs or other evidence that could be checked to determine the cause.
And don't think that we are immune if we use non-Samsung phones. It's probably only a matter of time before Apple, LG, or some other manufacturer has a similar problem, and also can't figure it out because of the total destruction involved. A lot of energy density is being packed into a tiny space.
That is probably true, but nobody has yet tackled the elephant in the room which is the question: "How is all of this Apple's fault?"
You gave enough of a fuck to hit the post button and type out that response.
Incendiary devices... or maybe cluster bombs
love is just extroverted narcissism
I've worked on some failed products before. What's scary is the attitude of the sociopaths at the top, the management chain, and general clusterfuck of accountability and deniability involved. Trust me: what Samsung is "saying" and what the fuck is "actually happening" there are completely different beasts. I have no doubt that they know exactly what happened and exactly what corners were cut that ultimately lead to this problem. Even the failure of the reissued devices is not so surprising, with management stuck in a corner, and doing everything they could to avoid the complete recall, only the bare minimum was done for the replacement units, and ultimately that was insufficient.
I've posted this here before, but the scariest thing about the failure of these (and any highly dense energy storage, LiPo or otherwise) devices is the risk of cabin fire aboard an aircraft. The chance of surviving a cabin fire is pretty slim. As a regular business traveler I found my peace with the demons of air travel by choosing reliable airlines and trusting national regulators to enforce maintenance schedules. But the chance that some faulty device operated by a clueless user will catch fire in the cabin and kill all of us has made me seriously rethink my travel arrangements for the foreseeable future. That kind of risk is not acceptable to me, and is infinitely more likely and terrifying than any terrorist threat...
You know what most of you people should do? Buy the cheapest, most simple phone you can find (that is JUST A PHONE), and be happy with that. You do not NEED a gods-be-damned 'smartphone'. For most of you it's just a TOY to distract yourselves with, or something else to satisfy your oral fixation with. In fact, many of you should just skip cellphones completely and be happy with a wired phone where you live.
None of the stuff in the phones is "lost". It's not like those phones are sent off planet. They're sent to a dump. And it's less commercially viable to "mine" these elements there than from the natural deposit.
At some point in the future, when extracting those materials from the earth becomes more and more expensive, recycling those phones, i.e. "mining the dump" becomes economically viable. So think of the future generations and dump them in one place, so your grandchildren have a chance to hit the jackpot when digging in the dump for lithium.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The financial incentive will motivate them to figure it out.
The fact that they can't determine why these phones are going up in smoke is scary. In a way it's understandable; the ones that do end up exploding burn up so there's no system logs or other evidence that could be checked to determine the cause.
System log? It's the battery... even with the worst programming in the world, the battery should do nothing worse than heat up slightly. System logs are irrelevant.
> . It's probably only a matter of time before Apple, LG, or some other manufacturer has a similar problem, and also can't figure it out because of the total destruction involved.
Apple already does; their response is that third-party USB chargers are to blame.
Which of course is false, since USB chargers' job is to provide 5VDC (aside from QC which can provide higher voltages at request of the device), that's all; the USB charger will keep supplying 5VDC as long as it is connected. It is the device's job to monitor the battery's voltage and cut off current to the battery pack when the target voltage is reached... and if there is an incoming overvoltage, it's also the device's job to stop accepting power.
This has been an ongoing problem since the iPhone 4, but since Apple is Apple, they get a free pass on it.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
To the submitter / editor - -whoever was responsible for that idiot headline:
It's not a "travesty." It was done in good faith. They certainly didn't plan to have to recall and dispose of these things. It's a tragedy, if you want a word you can use without looking like an illiterate, hysterical fool.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Can send them to Apple for their disassembly robot.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/27/...
"No disassembly Stephanie!" -obligatory Short Circuit reference.
At 1.2 million phones a year it should just take a little over 2 years for Liam to do all 2.5m... assuming one could be tweaked to work with the SGN7.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Strip the batteries and sell the hardware at a reduced price. I'd by several like that if the cost were low enough.
A travesty is not a tragedy, in theater it is quite the opposite in fact.
It comes from the French word "travestir", coming from latin "trans" (cross) and "vestire" (dressing). And in French, it means exactly that.
Environmental travesty... now I have images of drag queens running in the woods...
You've already figured out the cause & stated it!
RE: A lot of energy density is being packed into a tiny space.
Real engineers understand that constantly operating at the bleeding edge leads to statistically inevitable disasters. Our over-scheduled, rate-race, work-or-connect-all-the-time culture inevitably leads to breakdowns and failures.
Smartphones are the new crack.
Relaxing needs to become the new normal. I've never owned one of these smart devices and I'm enjoying life just fine, thanks. More than a lot of jittery always-connected people, as far as I can tell.
See above. Apple promote a toxic culture.
The whole idea of constantly pushing out bleeding-edge technology to the masses is inevitably going to lead to disasters like this.
It's as if half the country is stuffed into early Apollo capsules. Bleeding edge is fine for some engineering problems, but has now become standard practice, which means we all will suffer. Statistics is a bitch of a mistress.
nobody has yet tackled the elephant in the room
I strongly advise against tackling any elephant.
Wanna dispose of 'em? Turn 'em on and charge. Will take care of itself.
"...it takes roughly 165 pounds of raw mined materials to make the average cell phone..."
In the meantime, it takes roughly 1996.3 pounds of labor-intensive grown food per year to grow the human brain that thought up this brainless argument.
And that, indeed, is a tragedy.
You do realize that not all chargers are manufactured alike, right? And they don't always give you 5VDC. In fact, the cheapest of the lot often give a very bad representation of DC, nevermind 5V. In fact, some are so bad, you can get 110VAC/240VAC on the USB because of poor clearances. Indeed, someone was electrocuted because of this.
And no, if it happened to Apple, it would be massive - "batterygate" would join antennagate, and the latter was something only discovered if you really tried at it (and I think even so, it affected more people than the number of exploding iPhones in grand total). Apple's incidences are more random and spread out - while Samsung's really just happened. You'd think if Apple messed up just as bad, that some Android fanboi would be pointing out that the iPhone 7 also has 70-80 causes of it spontaneously combusting by now.
Ironically, Samsung has some of the bset USB chargers around. Problem is, most people are buying the crap $20 chargers that really are safety hazards.
http://www.righto.com/2012/10/...
They could run lots of experiments on the returned phones, many more than is usually economical.
[captcha: gifted]
Everything's a fucking travesty with you man!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
THe large mining trucks have payloads of 500 tonnes. 2 million phones at 165 pounds per phone is about 400 truck loads.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Standardizing parts would help a lot. In this case, for example, it's a lot of screens and such that have nothing to do with the problem that SHOULD be going into the spare parts bins for repairs.
Is this for the one guy who kept hist Galaxy 7?
You know, so he can replace the parts every 5 -7 days as it catches on fire?
... see https://translate.google.com/t... ;-)
The fact that they can't determine why these phones are going up in smoke is scary.
I don't for a moment think that they can't figure it out. I'm inclined to believe they have figured it out and:
a) The repair would required a re-run of the motherboard or
b) The second recall to fix the problem has tarnished the brand irrevocably.
To be honest the writing was on the wall for the Note 7 when airlines started telling people to not use them announcing them in airports. They say that there's no such thing as bad advertising, but "they" are wrong. This is just cutting losses.
Expect a Note 8 to be released shortly with very similar hardware.
The fact that they can't determine why these phones are going up in smoke is scary. In a way it's understandable; the ones that do end up exploding burn up so there's no system logs or other evidence that could be checked to determine the cause.
The problem is obviously the charging circuit. If it were anything else, they could just put in better batteries, or ship better chargers. The recall happened because the problem is on board the phone itself.
Newer phones still have the problem, so we know it's a design problem, rather than a component sourcing problem (like the counterfeit capacitors problem). In addition, Samsung manufactures their own phones, and their assembly lines operate differently, compared to Chinese assembly lines at Foxconn: it's very easy for them to localize a problem in the manufacturing process, whereas Foxconn goes out of their way to hide it by making bad employees into nameless cogs.
So basically, they have a design problem in the charging circuit, probably in the cell leveling portion of the charger, in the same way that the "Hoverboard" clones that keep starting on fire have a known bad charging circuit that overcharges some lithium cells in the larger battery, while other lithium cells get too little charge, on the charging circuit keeps drawing amps for all of the cells.
Then when the overcharged cells are discharged, they pretty much "Flame On!", and someone does a fair imitation of The Human Torch(tm).
This stuff isn't rocket science, it's basically third year in a U.S. community college EE and analog circuit design.
Whatever the cause, the danger is the battery catching fire in the thin case. It'd be great if the phone could be installed in a different and larger/cooler case with a different battery and given to school kids.
L: 278 Phones x 69.8mm == 19404.4mm
W: 142 Phones x136.6mm == 19397.2mm
H: 2533 Phones x 7.9mm == 20010.7mm
AND:
278x142x2533 == 99,992,708
278x142x2534 == 100,032,184
... and trusting national regulators to enforce...
Hooray for regulations! I'm not being funny here, it just seems that more and more people these days seem to believe that regulation = bad, and that'd we'd all be better off living in the jungle. Regulations are what keep most of us alive, so it's good to see this recognised once in a while :)
"There is a potential silver lining here: Just as oil spills give scientists an opportunity to try out new cleanup techniques, a large-scale smartphone recall may allow us to learn more about how to recycle smartphones."
We do know how to recycle smartphones. Apple even made a fancy robot called Liam to do it (where the impressive thing is that it does disassembly, which means a much higher rate of recovery of usable materials than standard methods). This is not an issue of skill but will.
Oh, they do know the cause - the battery is a little bit too big and bends on the edges with the round case, eventually causing a short circuit inside.
The fact that they can't determine why these phones are going up in smoke is scary.
They're going up in smoke because lithium ion batteries are notoriously difficult chemistry to get right and on top of that they keep trying to cram more power into the same or thinner / smaller battery to get even more life between charges. At some point, something has to give. In this case it was the battery itself. They were probably hoping that their new battery packed a punch, but this probably wasn't what they had in mind.
Was on a Alaska flight from SEA to SNA yesterday morning and the flight crew did mention the 7's and to keep them turned off at all times, no charging.
That said, I'm not too worried about open flames in a small space on an airliner (see below.) It wasn't that long ago we had smoking-sections and before that, non-smoking sections. (And before that, what the hell are you talking about?)
One note though. I work for a company that makes the cabins for airliners and there is a whole lot of Flammability testing on EVERYTHING. That sticker that says where the flotation device is, reams of paperwork and a page for each individual sticker. I don't think I can name anything that is more tested than an modern airliner. Truly a marvel of engineering. An overhead luggage compartment, designed to be very light, I can pick one up with one arm, will take a static load of over 2 tons just so nothing will come flying out when there's a hard landing.
Interesting side note, we did have one factory blow up (collapsed the roof) when the machine impregnating the non-flammability into cloth didn't get vented correctly.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
In fact, the cheapest of the lot often give a very bad representation of DC, nevermind 5V. In fact, some are so bad, you can get 110VAC/240VAC on the USB because of poor clearances. Indeed, someone was electrocuted because of this.
Chargers with that problem tend to be recalled. I've never heard of such a case happening outside of China.
It is also pretty telling that the problem with third party chargers is an excuse Apple uses but that nobody else experiences.
My guess is that the third party charger excuse comes from an early speculation in-house to what the problem could be that then the marketing went with because it was convenient and shifted the blame.
As for the clearance issue you can see for yourself how the Apple charger is designed.
It looks pretty OK when disassembled, but once you fold it into the cube form the primary side capacitors (C1 + C11) is like 1-2 mm from the USB connector.
It's a typical paper product. Looks fine on the schematic but in practice it is a deathtrap.
Blame third party chargers all you want, but the Apple charger isn't safe.
Whilst landfill is a horrible waste for these smartphones letting them explode is going to be far more damaging to the environment.
Samsung should be put under pressure to find a way to reuse the other parts and dispose of the batteries another way.
The issue seemed to be more that the batteries where not configured right than inherently dangerous so its possible a reconfiguration could be done with them.
[site]
Very few Apple phones have gone up in smoke, and for the few that have the cause has been physical damage. Usually people putting their phones in their back pockets and sitting on them. The repeated stress of your entire body weight compressing and twisting the phone eventually damages the battery and causes the fire.
Even then, the number of fires has been so small that it's not a statistically relevant problem.
I bet there is a landfill somewhere in New Mexico waiting to be used....
the chance that some faulty device operated by a clueless user will catch fire in the cabin and kill all of us
That's actually not much of a problem, because while it's being operated, it's trivial to just add lots of water to get the fire under control. It's a bit more dangerous if a phone in the overhead luggage catches fire and ignites a few suitcases and their contents before it is found, and it's quite another problem if something goes off in the cargo hold and cannot be brought under control.
In addition to the waste of the phones.. there has to be tons of cases, screen protectors, and other accessories that were made specifically for the note 7 that are now completely useless. Im curious now if Samsung is going to be sued now by the accessory makers that undoubtedly dumped millions into designing and manufacturing all those cases. I suppose they may be a little easier to recycle though.
Hope Samsung doesn't forget to reclaim the patent royalties they paid to assmonkeys at Microsoft.
The chance of surviving a cabin fire is pretty slim.
Citation? There's oxygen for each passenger and fire extinguishers. Plus everything is made to be non-flammable.
These phones are absolutely safe if the battery is removed and they are powered by a wired supply.
Give them to researchers to create a cell-phone supercomputer or other possible projects.
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
I'll post my reply here, but there are a few other sibling posters asking similar questions.
This report collates historical data on in-flight fires. From the report: "Fire in the air is one of the most hazardous situations that a flight crew can be faced with. Without aggressive intervention by the flight crew, a fire on board an aircraft can lead to the catastrophic loss of that aircraft within a very short space of time. Once a fire has become established, it is unlikely that the crew will be able to extinguish it. The following table from a UK CAA report in 2002 supports the generally held view that, from the first indication that there is a fire onboard the aircraft, the crew has on average approximately 17 minutes to get the aircraft on the ground."
Crew guidance
It's not all doom and gloom, here is a more moderate report from the FAA.
I'll agree entirely with the observations that most cabin materials are fire retardant, and this is a very good thing. However, we are considering a very dense energy source that can spontaneously combust. In addition, have you noticed that airlines won't let you fly with a spare laptop battery in your checked luggage? They are very concerned about a spontaneous fire in the luggage hold, where most of the material is certainly not fire proof.
Safe travels everyone.
BS. There have been reports of iPhones with no prior damage spontaneously bursting into flames. Apple laptops have been know to do this too, going all the way back to the PowerBook 5300 and continuing on to Apple laptops up to a few years ago. The same has happened with iPods.
Apple is notorious for making products that burst into flames. Meanwhile none of my Nokia, Motorola or LG phones have had any problems. Nor have my Acer, Asus, Dell or Alienware laptops. Nor have my Creative Labs, Cowon or SanDisk media players.
There is one big market for exploding stuff that just can't get enough of it.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.