We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.
I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)
But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I’m literally typing on the older phone now.
I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.
Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.
I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.
But if we don’t start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we’re going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.
Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It’s technically “consumption” to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you’re talking about doesn’t factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That’s about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren’t going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.
If you’re going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that’s morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we’re talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.
We are all literally being tricked into bringing home more copper.
I bought a whole ass Samsung S25 In February, only to discover in March that a $6 part and $20 bucks of labor made my S22 perfectly serviceable (needed new USB charging port)
But like a dumbass I bought a phone after 3 years of waiting, and was giddy about it and I’m literally typing on the older phone now.
I have been trying to trick myself into letting devices grow into a more full obsolescence before replacing them, and have had very poor luck in doing so.
Plenty of this is my own impulse control, but plenty of this is by design and marketing, and if enough people are satisfied with their three years old cell phones bad things happen to your 401k and to my friends employed in South Korea.
I realize that this is an infinitesimally smaller amount of copper, Even all-in with accessories, and the institutional and industrial requirements for copper.
But if we don’t start to figure out some sort of degrowth, we’re going to hit that wall as others have mentioned, and it all seems to start with the marketing demand and design.
Copper is a material that is used in many more orders of magnitude for infrastructure and basic development. It’s technically “consumption” to eat food everyday and have running water and electricity in your home, but the type of materialist luxury consumption you’re talking about doesn’t factor into global copper demand. There are 7.2 billion smartphones in use, and about 14g of copper in each one. That’s about 100,000 metric tons of copper, when the article talks about 110 million as a baseline (11,000 times as much), and above 200 million (20,000 times as much). So no, consumer electronics aren’t going to move the needle on this scale of a problem.
If you’re going to tell the developing countries that they need to stop developing, that’s morally suspect. And frankly, environmentally suspect, as the article itself is about moving off of fossil fuels and electrifying a lot of our energy needs in both the developed and developing nations, whether we’re talking relatively clean energy source like natural gas or dirtier sources like coal, or even dirtier sources like wood or animal dung.