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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.
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?
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
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.
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'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...
"Aaah, ET now phone home ... *BOOM*
Table-ized A.I.
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
Facts be damned. First, the iPhone doesn't change major versions every 12 months, but rather every 24 months. Second, if you take decent care of your phone, it will not "wear out" before an amount of time has elapsed where virtually everyone will agree that it is functionally obsolete (e.g., my iPhone 4 that is now used as a glorified iPod and still going strong). Third, there's a secondary market for functioning non-obsolete phones; Gazelle is not offering $50 for good condition iPhone 5 16GB units (now up to 4 years old) only to landfill them or scrap them for $5 in recoverable materials.
Buy a new phone when you want a new phone. Someone will buy your old phone because they don't want to buy a new phone, just as I buy used cars because I don't want to buy a new car. Only a moron would think that Samsung's environmental problems in removing spontaneously combusting phones from the market are remotely analogous to the environmental impact of someone flipping a one or two year old telephone into the used market. Secondary buyers "deserve" flagship-type phones as much as the original buyers; many are simply willing to wait for them to become used.
Dollars to donuts I can find something you do that seems wasteful, unnecessary, and irresponsible. Just like you two have with phone upgrades. Odds are even better that it has a higher environmental impact, like your house in the suburbs, your two hour commute, or your air conditioning. You're not going to like those answers...
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...
"...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.
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.
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.
The problem is the battery and the fact that the battery is not user-replaceable.
If they wanted to salvage the phones, they could design a new case to accommodate a replaceable battery. Disassemble the phone, put it in the new case with a new good replaceable battery and they should be good to go. Seems a much better solution than just trashing the phones.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
... 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 :)