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.

Comments

Environmental Wack Job

[frovingslosh]

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.

It's scary that they can't figure out the cause.

[ZorinLynx]

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.

Re:Or, you know...

[ColdWetDog]

What, for fire sales?

Re:It's scary that they can't figure out the cause

[NotAPK]

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...

FFS

[fyngyrz]

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.

Travesty?

[GuB-42]

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...

Re:Travesty?

[thegarbz]

Travesty meaning something represented in a false or absurd way (like the origins of the word).

You should really use an example when trying to explain words. Like:
"This slashdot headline is a travesty."

It takes roughly 165 pounds...

[mbeckman]

"...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.

They already know the cause.

[tlambert]

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.

Re:Obviously needs to change

[hairyfeet]

I say a MUCH better solution would be to force the OS and handset OEMs to completely open the drivers and OSes so they can continue to be supported.

Lets face it most of the phones made in the last couple of years could last a long time IF their operating systems could be upgraded...but they can't, and since no security patches will be coming to those systems its into the trash they go. Even most cheap phones today have quad cores with a Gb of RAM so running a newer version of Android wouldn't be an issue but the vast majority? Will never see any updates and you can't even download a ROM because its not one of the handful of big name phones that the modding community supports.

I know that there are several phones I had in the past I would have happily held onto longer if only I could get an updated OS but with so much malware targeting smartphones these days? Its just not wise to keep an out of date phone. If the drivers had to be open, so it would be trivial to support and people knew they could keep their phone and just get the new OS if they wanted? I have a feeling a lot of these phones wouldn't be ending up in a junk drawer or a landfill.