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.Benjamin Sprecher, a postdoc studying extraction of rare earth metals in recycling at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told me in an email that "smartphones are not really recycled (the rare earth elements, anyway), so you'd lose almost all the interesting stuff in those smartphones.""Smartphones are not really recycled."
This is from Samsung's 2016 sustainability report. It doesn't show the Note 7, however it's safe to assume that a huge percentage of the phone's environmental impact comes from the mining stage of its development. Image: Samsung
Samsung has touted the biomaterials its used in some of its phones, which doesn't change the fact that the majority of the elements and metals used in the phone are unrecyclable and environmentally taxing to mine. Image: Samsung
None of these ostensibly sustainable practices changes the fact that with the Note 7, Samsung has mined the Earth, shipped the raw materials to its factories, manufactured the product, shipped the product to customers and then immediately turned a highly valuable product into much less useful recycled materials."Obviously it's a massive waste of resources"
"Think how much easier it would have been to manage the Note 7 problems, too, if it had been possible to simply remove the battery"
