THE PHONE THAT WAS FINE YESTERDAY

THE PHONE THAT WAS FINE YESTERDAY

Yesterday, there was nothing wrong with your phone.

It woke you up. It carried your messages, photographs, passwords and maps. Its camera was good enough to document a journey, its battery probably survived most of the day, and the apps you opened in the morning behaved much as they had the morning before. Perhaps there was a scratch across the glass or a battery that no longer felt quite as young as it once did, but nothing fundamental had changed.

Then a new phone arrived.

Suddenly, the camera you rarely questioned has fewer megapixels. The processor has a previous-generation name. The screen is missing a feature you did not know you needed. A colour appears that yours does not come in. Reviews begin comparing photographs taken in identical light. Videos ask whether the upgrade is worth it. Specifications line up beside one another until differences that seemed irrelevant yesterday acquire a new significance.

The strange thing is that your phone has not changed.

Only the object beside which you are being asked to imagine it has.

This gap — between an object becoming technically unusable and beginning to feel culturally old — has become increasingly important as smartphones themselves remain in use for longer. Recent research suggests that global smartphone replacement cycles have lengthened over the past decade, even as perceived obsolescence, the expected benefits of upgrading and social influence continue to shape consumers’ intentions to replace their devices (Corrocher and Paganuzzi, 2025; Hung et al., 2026).

That complicates the familiar story of electronic waste. The problem is not simply that devices break too quickly, nor that consumers mechanically discard one phone whenever another appears. A functioning device can remain in use for years. It can be repaired, resold, passed on or eventually recycled. Yet long before any of those things happen, another process may already have begun: the arrival of its successor changes the context in which the existing object is seen.

And that arrival rarely happens quietly.

A new smartphone now enters a culture already waiting for it — through rumours and leaks, predictions and teasers, launch events and livestreams, hands-on videos, camera tests, reviews, reactions and the inevitable question: should you upgrade?

So perhaps the beginning of electronic waste is not only the moment an object is thrown away.

Perhaps we also need to look much earlier, at the moment when something that still works begins to feel as though it belongs to the past.

WHEN NEWNESS BECOMES A CALENDAR

There was once something relatively simple about the arrival of a new product. It was announced, advertised and sold. Today, particularly in consumer technology, arrival has become harder to locate.

A phone can begin to exist in public imagination months before anyone can buy it. There are rumours about its design, predictions about its camera, leaks from supply chains, renders based on those leaks, discussions about possible colours and prices, and videos assessing whether any of these things are likely to be true. Eventually comes the official announcement. Then the livestream. Then the first impressions, reviews, comparisons and recommendations. Before long, speculation begins about whatever comes next.

Marketing research has a useful term for part of this process: new product preannouncement. A product that has been announced but is not yet available can already enter the consumer’s field of choice. Rao and Turut (2019) describe such unavailable alternatives as phantom products: objects that may influence how existing choices are evaluated even before they can be purchased.

This makes the moment of arrival surprisingly difficult to define.

When does a new phone actually arrive — when it reaches the shop, or when we begin imagining it?

The smartphone industry makes that question particularly visible because newness is distributed across the year. In 2026 alone, Samsung unveiled its Galaxy S26 series in February; Google presented its Pixel 11 generation in August; and Apple introduced its iPhone 18 Pro generation in September (Samsung Electronics, 2026; Google, 2026; Apple, 2026b). Each belongs to a different corporate schedule, but together they create something broader than a single annual launch: a recurring calendar of technological renewal.

And the manufacturer is only the beginning.

Once information enters social media, the distinction between marketing and conversation becomes less tidy. A launch becomes reaction videos, posts, searches, reviews and recommendations. Research into smartphone-related electronic word of mouth has found associations between information communicated by digital influencers, its perceived usefulness and consumers’ buying intentions, with Instagram and YouTube performing more strongly than Facebook across several of the measures examined (Rosário and Loureiro, 2021).

More recent research into pre-release consumer buzz suggests something even more interesting. Anticipation can become social. Consumers do not encounter only the forthcoming product; they encounter other people waiting for it. Mandler et al. (2025) found that observing collective anticipation can stimulate curiosity and influence expectations surrounding a forthcoming product. Their examples of anticipation events include technology keynotes such as Apple’s product launches — moments in which the unveiling of an object becomes part of a wider culture of collective expectation.

That attention does not necessarily translate into a purchase. Nor does watching an unboxing video mean that a perfectly functional phone will be replaced the following morning. Communication, curiosity, desire, intention and behaviour are not interchangeable, and treating them as though they were would make the relationship between marketing and consumption far simpler than the evidence allows.

But attention matters because it creates comparison.

The more frequently the next object appears before us, the more frequently the current one acquires something against which it can be measured. A slightly brighter display, a different camera arrangement, a faster processor or a new software capability may be genuinely useful innovations. They may also be incremental ones. What matters here is not whether each improvement deserves to exist, but how continuously the existence of improvement is made visible.

Research into pre-release consumer buzz increasingly describes this process not as a single advertising moment but as an interaction between communication, search and participation. Consumers talk about an unreleased product, seek information about it and participate in the surrounding content; these behaviours can reinforce one another, while company communication can stimulate further searching and discussion (Schreiner et al., 2025). Although the study examined film releases rather than smartphones, the framework helps describe the wider dynamics through which anticipation can circulate around forthcoming products.

NEWNESS IS NO LONGER AN EVENT.
IT IS A CONTINUOUS STATE.

The launch, then, is no longer confined to the stage on which a phone is unveiled.

It stretches backwards into anticipation and forwards into evaluation.

A rumour becomes a render.
A render becomes an announcement.
An announcement becomes a livestream.
A livestream becomes a review.
A review becomes a comparison.
A comparison becomes a question about upgrading.

And somewhere in that sequence, rumours about the next device begin.

This is where the word ‘spectacle’ becomes useful — not because every consumer is hypnotised by marketing, nor because manufacturers possess some irresistible power over their audiences, but because technological newness is repeatedly made visible, discussable and anticipatory. The stage is only one part of the spectacle. Much of it is produced afterwards by journalists, creators, platforms and consumers themselves.

Perhaps, then, newness is no longer an event at all.

It is a continuous state.

And that creates an unusual condition for an object designed to remain in our pockets for several years: while the physical phone continues ageing at its own pace, the culture surrounding it is already moving towards whatever comes next.

Which leaves a more difficult question.

How does a phone that still works begin to feel old?

ADVERTISEMENT

HOW A WORKING PHONE BECOMES OLD

A phone does not have to stop working to become old.

Its battery may still last until evening. The screen may remain intact. Its camera may still take photographs that would have seemed extraordinary only a few years earlier. It can navigate a city, stream a film, make a payment and carry thousands of photographs without giving its owner any compelling reason to replace it.

And yet it can begin to feel as though its time is running out.

Part of the difficulty is that obsolescence describes several different processes that do not necessarily happen together. A smartphone can deteriorate materially as its battery, screen or components wear. It can become functionally obsolete when limitations in software, storage or performance prevent it from meeting current demands. It can become economically obsolete when repair begins to seem less worthwhile than replacement. But it can also become psychologically obsolete: still functional, yet increasingly perceived as dated in relation to newer technology, changing fashions and the appeal of novelty (Corrocher and Paganuzzi, 2025).

That last distinction changes the question.

Instead of asking only how long a smartphone can last, we might also ask: how long do we continue to regard it as worth keeping?

There is evidence that these two timelines are not the same. In a study of more than 3.5 million benchmark tests from iPhones, Tamar Makov and Colin Fitzpatrick found that the objective performance of the devices remained relatively stable over time. The phones, in other words, did not show the rapid deterioration that a simple narrative of technological ageing might lead us to expect. Yet the researchers found something different when they examined 22 million visits to a website providing free repair manuals: interest in repairing devices declined substantially as those devices aged (Makov and Fitzpatrick, 2021).

THE MACHINE AND OUR PERCEPTION OF THE MACHINE DO NOT NECESSARILY AGE AT THE SAME SPEED.

The authors describe part of this divergence in terms of mental depreciation and perceived obsolescence. Their findings do not prove why an individual decides to replace a particular phone, and they caution against reducing smartphone lifespans to a simple narrative of technical deterioration or repairability alone. But the results reveal an important separation between what happens to the machine and what happens to our perception of it.

The machine and our perception of the machine do not necessarily age at the same speed.

This does not mean that technological obsolescence is imaginary.

Batteries lose capacity. Displays break. Storage fills. Software requirements change. Applications cease to support older operating systems, and new hardware can enable functions that previous generations simply cannot perform. An upgrade can therefore represent a genuine improvement rather than a triumph of marketing over reason. Research into smartphone replacement also suggests that the balance between different forms of obsolescence is changing, with software-related limitations and repairability becoming more prominent in newer generations of devices (Corrocher and Paganuzzi, 2025).

Consumers are not powerless in this process either. Some tolerate declining performance for surprisingly long periods. Corrocher and Paganuzzi found in their Italian sample that functional obsolescence was actually associated with longer device lifespans, particularly among more technologically engaged users, suggesting that people may continue using phones despite performance problems rather than replacing them at the first sign of decline. Psychological and economic obsolescence, by contrast, were more strongly associated with earlier replacement.

There is something reassuringly ordinary about that behaviour. A battery becomes annoying rather than unusable. A cracked corner remains a cracked corner. An app takes a little longer to open. The owner notices all of this and carries on.

Mine still works.

But the phone does not age in isolation.

The arrival of a new model gives the existing one a new neighbour. Its camera can now be placed beside another camera; its processor beside another processor; its screen, materials, software and design beside their latest equivalents. Features that once existed simply as characteristics of an object become points of comparison.

This is where the continuous production of newness described earlier begins to matter. Research on smartphone replacement links psychological obsolescence to factors including novelty, fashion and changing perceptions of what a current device should offer (Corrocher and Paganuzzi, 2025). The new product does not have to make the old one stop working. Its existence can simply alter the frame within which the old one is judged.

Yesterday's camera has not become worse overnight.

There is simply a better camera beside it.

Yesterday's processor has not slowed because another processor was announced.

There is simply a number with which to compare it.

And yesterday's design has not physically aged between one launch event and the next.

Its reference point has moved.

That may be one of the quieter contradictions of contemporary consumer technology. A smartphone can remain technically capable long beyond the moment when the culture surrounding it begins preparing us for its successor. Technical longevity and cultural longevity are not necessarily moving together.

And perhaps obsolescence therefore tells us as much about relationships as it does about objects.

Obsolescence does not always describe what has happened to the phone. Sometimes it describes what has happened to our relationship with it.

Still, feeling that something is old is not the same as replacing it. A comparison can be noticed and ignored. A launch can be watched without producing a purchase. A person can admire a new device, put the phone already in their hand back into their pocket and continue using it for another year.

Something else has to happen before comparison becomes consumption.

The new phone has to become desirable.

And that is where the story moves next.

THE DESIRE TO UPGRADE

The new phone has to become desirable.

That sounds obvious, but desire is not the same as need. Nor is it the same as intention, and intention is still not the same as purchase. Between noticing a new device and actually replacing the one in our pocket sits a negotiation: what the new phone promises, what the old one lacks, what other people appear to value, what an upgrade will cost — and whether any of it matters enough to make us act.

Recent research into smartphone upgrading describes this negotiation through a useful push–pull–mooring framework. Perceived obsolescence functions as a push factor; anticipated benefits and social influence as pull factors; while attachment to the status quo can hold consumers where they are. In a 2026 study of 777 smartphone owners across Indonesia, Taiwan and the United States, these forces were associated with perceived need and intentions to upgrade in different directions: perceived obsolescence, upgrade benefits and social influence strengthened the case for changing devices, while status-quo bias weakened it (Hung et al., 2026).

This makes desire less straightforward than it first appears.

A new camera may genuinely be better. A processor may be faster. A battery may last longer, a display may be brighter, or a new piece of hardware may enable something the previous generation cannot do. For someone who needs that capability, the value of upgrading may be entirely practical.

But utility is not the only value a new object can possess.

Research into smartphone obsolescence also identifies novelty, fashion and interest in technological innovation as factors associated with earlier replacement behaviour. Some consumers place particular value on knowing about the latest models, possessing high-performance features or keeping up with technological change (Corrocher and Paganuzzi, 2025).

In other words, sometimes part of what is desirable about the new phone is precisely that it is new.

That distinction matters because technological improvement does not automatically create a compelling reason to upgrade. Earlier research into mobile-phone replacement found that even when consumers perceived next-generation devices as easier to use and more useful, these advantages did not directly translate into intentions to upgrade, particularly when users remained satisfied with their current phones (Tseng and Lo, 2011). Subsequent research similarly found that satisfied users may skip an intermediate generation altogether, waiting instead for a future device perceived to offer a more meaningful improvement (Tseng and Chiang, 2013).

Better is not automatically better enough.

The old phone, after all, has advantages that rarely appear on a specification sheet.

It is familiar. It is already configured. It contains photographs, passwords, conversations, habits and gestures accumulated through everyday use. Its owner knows how long the battery will last, where everything is and which imperfections can be tolerated. The new phone has novelty on its side. The old one has familiarity.

This resistance matters. Research on mobile-phone lifespans has repeatedly complicated the image of consumers endlessly chasing whatever is newest. In an Austrian study combining a survey of 988 participants with 25 qualitative household interviews, Wieser and Tröger (2018) found perceived obsolescence to be a primary motivation for replacement, while also identifying consumer strategies that resist the rapid pace of obsolescence through longer use, repair and reuse. More recent work similarly identifies status-quo bias as a force working against intentions to upgrade (Hung et al., 2026).

Desire, then, exists alongside resistance.

But smartphones have another characteristic that makes this negotiation particularly interesting: they are private possessions used constantly in public.

We take them out at dinner. We place them on desks and café tables. We photograph one another with them, pay with them, scan tickets with them and hold them while navigating unfamiliar streets. Unlike many electronic devices, a smartphone is not simply technology we use. It is technology we use in front of other people.

That visibility gives the object a social dimension. Research among young adults has connected premature smartphone replacement not only with physical and functional characteristics but also with social norms, belonging and the positional value of owning the latest generation. Oraee et al. (2024), for example, found evidence in their study that some participants experienced discomfort using an older phone around peers. The study focused on a relatively small sample of young adults and should not be generalised to smartphone users as a whole, but it illustrates something easily missed when a phone is treated purely as a technical object: what we carry can communicate something about where we imagine ourselves in relation to others.

Social influence does not mean social obedience. Seeing a friend with a new phone, watching a creator demonstrate one or noticing it repeatedly in public does not compel anyone to buy it. But these encounters add another form of value to the comparison already taking place — not simply what can this phone do?, but what does having it mean?

And then there is price.

The cost of upgrading can stop desire from becoming action, but contemporary replacement systems can also change how that cost is perceived. Trade-in programmes give the existing device a residual monetary value that can be placed against the price of its successor. Research into smartphone obsolescence suggests that such programmes can alter the economic calculation surrounding replacement (Corrocher and Paganuzzi, 2025).

This creates an intriguing contradiction that will matter later in the story. A traded-in phone may continue its life through resale or refurbishment rather than becoming waste. At the same time, the value offered for returning it can make replacing a functioning device economically easier.

The old phone can therefore become both something worth keeping and something worth exchanging.

None of these forces guarantees an upgrade. That may be the most important point.

A person can watch the launch, compare the specifications, admire the camera, recognise the improvement, see other people using it, check the trade-in value of the phone already in their pocket — and still decide to do nothing.

Mine is fine.

The distance between desire and replacement is where consumer agency remains visible.

Yet sometimes the calculation moves the other way. The improvement seems useful enough. The difference feels large enough. The price becomes acceptable enough. The novelty becomes attractive enough. What was initially a comparison becomes a preference; what was a preference becomes an intention; and eventually a new device replaces the old one.

But replacement creates a problem that the language of upgrading tends to obscure.

We know where the new phone goes.

What happens to the old one?

THE PHONE THAT DOESN’T DISAPPEAR

We know where the new phone goes.

Into a pocket, onto a desk, beside a bed. It is switched on, configured and connected to the accounts, photographs and conversations that once lived on the device it has replaced.

But what happens to the old one?

The simplest version of the story would send it directly towards waste. We buy, we use, we replace, we throw away. Yet the material life of a smartphone rarely follows such a neat sequence. Replacing a device is not necessarily the same as reaching the end of its life. A phone that is no longer wanted by its first owner may still be used by someone else: sold, traded in, passed to a friend or relative, repaired, refurbished or returned to circulation through a second-hand market. The European Environment Agency therefore distinguishes a product’s replacement cycle — the end of its first use — from its actual end of life, noting that replaced products may continue through reuse or resale (EEA, 2024).

But there is another destination, one so ordinary that it barely looks like a destination at all.

The drawer.

The old phone is switched off. Perhaps the SIM card is removed. A charging cable may be wrapped around it. The new device takes over, while its predecessor is placed somewhere safe with the vague expectation that it might still be useful one day.

Researchers have described this state as hibernation: a period of dead storage in which a mobile phone remains with its owner after leaving primary use. In a UK study of 181 mobile-phone owners aged 18–25, retained devices had spent, on average, around one year and eleven months as primary phones before remaining in hibernation for approximately three further years (Wilson et al., 2017). The sample was relatively small and limited to younger users, so those figures should not be treated as representative of every household. What they reveal instead is the peculiar possibility that a phone can spend longer waiting to be used again than it spent performing the job for which it was bought.

And the phenomenon has not disappeared with newer generations of smartphones. A 2025 study of 943 adults in South Korea found that 85.8 per cent reported storing old smartphones, with respondents retaining an average of two devices. The study also examined alternative routes, including trade-in, resale and passing devices to family or friends, showing how many possible futures can exist between replacement and disposal (Kang and Choi, 2025).

This is a useful correction to the language of electronic waste.

A replaced phone has not necessarily become waste.

Sometimes it has simply stopped moving.

There are perfectly understandable reasons for keeping it. It may serve as an emergency backup. There may be photographs or messages that have never been transferred. The owner may intend to sell it, give it away or erase it properly at some undefined point in the future. UK research has identified concerns about deleting or transferring personal data as one reason people retain unused electrical devices, while research into smartphone storage in South Korea has also found emotional attachment to be a barrier to disposal (Material Focus, 2024; Kang and Choi, 2025).

The language people use around these objects is revealing in itself:

It still works.

I might need it.

There are things on it.

I'll sort it out later.

None of these statements describes rubbish.

But later can be remarkably long.

Across the UK, unused electrical products accumulate in substantial numbers. Material Focus estimated that around 880 million unwanted and unused electrical items were being kept in UK homes — approximately 30 per household — with mobile phones among the products most likely to remain dormant (Material Focus, 2023). The figure covers electrical products broadly rather than smartphones alone, but the wider pattern is clear: a significant stock of electronics that people stop using does not immediately enter either a second life or a recycling system.

The drawer therefore represents something more complicated than simple wastefulness. It can preserve an object for future reuse. Keeping an old phone as a backup may be entirely rational, and passing it on later may extend its useful life. But indefinite storage can also postpone both possibilities: nobody else uses the device, and the materials inside it remain unavailable for recovery.

Keeping a phone is not the same as keeping it in use.

The device has entered an unusual state. It is no longer part of everyday consumption, yet it has not quite become waste. It may retain functional value, resale value, emotional value and material value simultaneously.

It sits in a kind of material limbo: functionally alive, economically dormant and materially valuable.

That last form of value is easy to forget because a smartphone hides it so effectively.

From the outside, the stored device is simply a small rectangle of glass and metal. Inside is a dense assembly of materials that have already travelled through mines, refineries, component factories and assembly lines before reaching the hand of its first owner. Copper, cobalt, lithium and other metals do not cease to exist when the screen goes dark. Nor does the environmental investment required to extract, process and manufacture them disappear when the phone enters a drawer.

This is why the scale of electronic waste tells only part of the story. The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 estimates that the world generated 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, of which 22.3 per cent was documented as formally collected and recycled. Within that total, small IT and telecommunications equipment — a category that includes mobile phones alongside laptops, routers and other devices — accounted for approximately 4.6 million tonnes, with a documented collection and recycling rate of around 22 per cent (Baldé et al., 2024).

Those figures describe products that have entered the waste stream.

The phone in the drawer occupies the space before that.

It has not disappeared. Its materials have not disappeared. And neither has the environmental cost already embedded within them.

Perhaps this is where the apparent simplicity of replacement begins to break open.

Between buy and throw sits an entire hidden life:

use, replace, keep, store, gift, resell, trade in, repair, refurbish — and eventually, perhaps, recycle or discard.

The word throw compresses all of those possibilities into a single action. The reality is slower, messier and much more interesting.

Because by the time we finally decide what to do with the old phone, one part of its environmental story is already over.

The materials have already been extracted.

The components have already been manufactured.

The device has already travelled.

The cost was already paid.

THE COST WAS ALREADY PAID

By the time a smartphone reaches its first owner, much of its environmental story has already happened.

Before the screen lights up for the first time, materials have been extracted, refined and processed. Components have been manufactured, assembled and transported through supply chains that stretch far beyond the place where the finished device is eventually sold. What arrives in the hand as a compact, seamless object is the endpoint of a much larger material journey.

The phone is small. Its geography is not.

Inside it are materials whose origins are almost impossible to read from the object itself. Glass, aluminium and copper sit alongside lithium, cobalt and a complex mixture of other metals and elements required for batteries, circuitry, displays and electronic components. The European Environment Agency notes that complex electronic equipment can contain up to 60 different chemical elements, connecting a device small enough to fit inside a pocket to networks of extraction, processing and manufacturing distributed across the world (EEA, 2020).

The environmental cost of that geography is not limited to carbon. Mining and material processing can require substantial energy and water, generate waste and pollution, and place pressure on ecosystems and finite mineral resources. Manufacturing adds another layer: semiconductor production, batteries, displays, circuit boards and final assembly all carry environmental burdens before the finished device has performed a single task (EEA, 2020).

For smartphones, this matters particularly because a substantial share of their lifecycle environmental impact can occur before and during production. Unlike some appliances whose impacts accumulate significantly during years of electricity use, smartphones carry considerable upstream impacts through material extraction, component production and manufacturing. The precise balance varies between devices and assessment methods, which makes a single universal footprint misleading (EEA, 2020). But the broader point remains: for a smartphone, a significant part of the environmental cost arrives before the consumer does.

That changes what it means to replace one.

When a functioning phone is exchanged for another, the environmental history of the first device is not transferred to its successor. A new material journey begins: new components must be produced, new materials processed and a new device assembled and transported.

This does not make technological improvement environmentally meaningless, nor does it mean every replacement is unnecessary. It means that the moment of purchase sits much later in the lifecycle than consumer culture tends to make visible.

The unboxing is not the beginning.

It is an arrival.

And the industry itself is increasingly acknowledging the importance of what happens before a device reaches its user.

Manufacturers have been working to reduce the impacts associated with production through recycled materials, renewable electricity and changes to supply chains. Apple, for example, reported in 2026 that recycled material accounted for 30 per cent of the material across products it shipped in 2025, alongside continued efforts to reduce manufacturing emissions through supplier clean-energy programmes and changes to material and industrial processes (Apple, 2026a). These are company-reported figures and should be understood as such, but they illustrate a broader and important point: making the next device less environmentally intensive matters.

Yet cleaner production and longer use solve different parts of the problem.

A phone manufactured with more recycled materials still required energy, components and assembly. A lower-carbon supply chain reduces the footprint of production; it does not eliminate the material consequences of producing another device. Conversely, keeping a phone for longer does not make the impacts of its original manufacture disappear.

What longer use can do is allow more useful life to emerge from an environmental cost that has already occurred.

Keeping a phone for longer does not erase its footprint. It gives that footprint more useful life.

That principle is beginning to appear not only in environmental research but also in product regulation. Since 20 June 2025, smartphones and slate tablets placed on the European Union market have been subject to new ecodesign and energy-labelling requirements addressing durability, battery longevity, repairability, spare parts and software support. European Commission modelling indicates that the measures could increase the average lifetime of a mid-range smartphone from approximately 3.0 to 4.1 years, implying fewer annual replacement sales if the number of devices in use remains constant (European Commission, 2025).

There are also tentative signs that the physical durability of some devices is improving. European Environment Agency analysis found that smartphones launched and assessed in 2024 performed significantly better on battery life and charging-connector durability than devices assessed from 2020 to 2022, while newer models also tended to perform better in terms of repairability. The Agency cautions, however, that the underlying Eco Rating system covers only a limited range of models and should not be treated as representative of the entire smartphone market (EEA, 2025).

This produces a curious reversal.

For years, conversations about electronic waste have often focused on products that do not last long enough. Now regulation, design and manufacturing are increasingly pushing in the opposite direction: towards batteries that survive more cycles, parts that can be replaced and software that remains supported for longer.

The physical phone is being asked to last.

But the cultural clock we encountered earlier has not stopped.

There will still be another launch. Another camera comparison. Another processor. Another colour. Another set of improvements presented against the device already in our hands. The material lifespan of the object may be stretching at precisely the moment the culture surrounding it continues to renew the idea of what current looks like.

This is not necessarily a contradiction that can be resolved by choosing one side.

We need devices that are cleaner to produce.

We need devices designed to remain functional for longer.

And once they exist, there is environmental value in keeping them useful for as long as it makes sense to do so.

Eventually, however, even a well-made, repaired and repeatedly used phone reaches a point when another life is no longer practical. Components fail. Repair ceases to be viable. Reuse becomes unlikely.

At that point, the answer appears obvious.

Recycle it.

But even here, the order matters.

Because recycling may be essential to a circular electronics system.

It is not necessarily where circularity should begin.

ADVERTISEMENT

RECYCLING IS NOT THE BEGINNING

Recycle it.

For an electronic device that can no longer be used, the instruction seems obvious. A smartphone contains materials that required energy, extraction and processing to obtain; allowing them to disappear into landfill or an undocumented waste stream makes little sense. When a device has genuinely reached the end of its useful life, recovering what can be recovered from it is an essential part of a more circular electronics system.

But end of useful life is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

A phone can leave one person's hands without reaching the end of its usefulness. It can be sold. Passed to someone else. Repaired after a component fails. Refurbished and returned to the market. Even remaining with its original owner for another year can be a form of life extension if it postpones the need for a replacement.

The distinction is important because recycling and reuse preserve different things.

REUSE PRESERVES THE PRODUCT.

RECYCLING RECOVERS THE MATERIAL.

A functioning smartphone is more than a collection of metals waiting to be separated. It is those materials already transformed into something capable of performing a function — after extraction, refining, manufacturing, assembly and transport have already taken place. If that function can reasonably continue, preserving it can retain more of the environmental investment already embodied in the device.

Recent life-cycle research into the preparation of waste electrical and electronic equipment for reuse makes this point increasingly visible. An assessment using real-world data from sorting centres in Greece found that repair and reuse of smartphones could reduce environmental impacts by up to 25 per cent in the scenarios examined, where reuse avoided the purchase of a new device (Kouloumpis et al., 2023). The result is important, but so is its condition: the benefit depends on the reused device displacing production or purchase that would otherwise have occurred.

More recent research reaches a complementary conclusion. Using an integrated emergy and life-cycle assessment of smartphone display repair, Carvalho et al. (2026) found substantial environmental benefits from preserving the investment already embodied in the device. Crucially, however, those benefits increased with the length of post-repair use. Repair, in other words, matters not simply because an intervention has taken place, but because the intervention allows the product to remain useful for longer.

But there is an important condition hidden inside those benefits.

Repair only avoids some of the impacts of new production if the repaired phone continues to be used in place of another device that would otherwise have been acquired. If an old phone is repaired but a new one is bought anyway, or if a refurbished phone becomes an additional device rather than a substitute for a newly manufactured one, the environmental equation changes. Life-cycle researchers therefore caution that the benefits of repair and reuse depend partly on displacement — what continued use actually prevents from happening elsewhere in the system (Kouloumpis et al., 2023).

Circularity depends not only on what happens to the old product but also on what that action prevents from happening next.

For a smartphone, that gives the order of decisions unusual importance.

If the phone still works, keep using it.

If something fails, can it be repaired?

If its owner no longer wants it, can somebody else use it?

Can it be resold, traded in or refurbished?

And only when preserving the device as a functioning product is no longer practical does the question fundamentally change:

What materials can we recover from it?

This way of thinking is increasingly visible in regulation. Since 20 June 2025, smartphones and slate tablets placed on the European Union market have been subject to ecodesign and energy-labelling requirements intended to improve durability and repairability. Smartphone batteries must withstand at least 800 charge and discharge cycles while retaining at least 80 per cent of their initial capacity. Specified spare parts must remain available for at least seven years after a model is no longer placed on the market, while operating-system requirements extend update availability for at least five years after that point. The rules also address access to repair information and software or firmware needed for replacement operations, while the EU energy label now includes a repairability class alongside information on battery endurance and durability (European Commission, 2025).

There is something significant in the direction of those requirements.

For much of this essay, we have asked:

How does a working phone become old?

Regulation is beginning to ask the question from the other direction:

How do we keep a working phone working?

The two questions operate on different clocks.

One concerns perception: comparison, novelty, desire and the cultural movement towards whatever comes next.

The other concerns the physical object: whether its battery can be replaced, whether components remain available, whether software continues to function and whether repair remains possible.

Extending that physical life does not require the same person to own the phone forever. Reuse can move the device through several hands while preserving the function for which its materials were originally assembled. The European Environment Agency places reuse, sharing, maintenance and repair among the strategies capable of extending product lifespans and reducing demand for replacement products (EEA, 2024).

A phone, in other words, can stop being my phone without stopping being a phone.

That may sound like a small distinction, but materially it is enormous.

Selling a functioning device to another user preserves the battery as a battery, the processor as a processor, the display as a display and the entire object as a functioning piece of technology. Recycling does something different. It attempts to recover value after preserving that complete function is no longer possible or worthwhile.

This is why recycling belongs in the story — but later in it.

Eventually, batteries fail beyond reasonable replacement. Components deteriorate. Damage becomes too extensive. Software support ends. A device may reach a point where continued use, repair or refurbishment is no longer practical. At that stage, recovering materials can reduce losses and return some resources to productive use rather than requiring all future demand to be met through primary extraction.

Recycling is not the failure of circularity. It is what circularity needs when the function can no longer be preserved.

And even then, recycling cannot simply reverse manufacturing. A smartphone is a complex assembly of materials, components and processes; recovering some of those materials at the end of its life does not recreate the complete functional value of the product that was originally manufactured.

It can recover value.

It cannot undo production.

Nor can it answer the question that has followed us from the beginning of this story.

What made the previous phone replaceable while it was still capable of being used?

That question sits upstream of the recycling facility, upstream of the repair shop and even upstream of the drawer where an old device may spend years waiting for a decision.

It takes us back to comparison.

To anticipation.

To the next launch.

To the moment when a functioning object begins to acquire a successor in our imagination.

Perhaps, then, circularity has to begin earlier than we usually allow it to.

Not only with what we do when something breaks.

Not only with where we send it when we no longer want it.

Not only with what materials we can recover when its useful life finally ends.

But with the expectations we build around how long an object should remain useful — and how long it should continue to feel worth using.

Because before we can decide how to deal with the end of a phone's life, there is another question to confront.

When did we decide that its life was over?

REPEAT / RE:THINK

There is still another launch.

Another comparison.

Another object arriving to provide a new reference point for the one already in our hand.

And this may be a contradiction at the centre of the contemporary smartphone: the object is increasingly being designed to last at the same time as the culture surrounding it continually prepares us for what comes next.

That does not make upgrading irrational. Sometimes the difference matters. Sometimes a battery has deteriorated, a device can no longer perform what is required of it, or a new capability genuinely changes what its owner can do. Nor does keeping every electronic object indefinitely offer a solution. Products eventually fail, materials eventually need to be recovered, and technological progress has real value.

The question is not whether we should stop wanting new things.

It is whether new has quietly become enough of a reason on its own.

Perhaps this is where repeat needs to become re:think.

Not because replacement is always unnecessary, but because the moment before replacement deserves more attention than we usually give it.

To rethink the smartphone is not only to ask where we recycle it when we are finished with it. It is to ask when finished begins.

When did the phone become inadequate?

What changed in the object — and what changed around it?

Was its function exhausted, or did its reference point move?

Could its life continue in another hand?

And what has already been extracted, manufactured and transported before another device takes its place?

Perhaps electronic waste begins much earlier than the bin, the recycling centre or the forgotten phone in a drawer.

Perhaps it begins with the moment a functioning object first becomes imaginable as something that should be replaced.

The phone in our hand may be exactly the same phone it was yesterday.

It still wakes us up.

It still carries our photographs, messages, passwords and maps.

It still works.

The question is whether we can still see it that way.

This article grew from Buy, Throw, Repeat, a collaborative student project I worked on in 2023, exploring electronic waste and our relationship with mobile technology. Developed through a series of posters, a zine and an animated piece, the project looked at the culture of frequent upgrading and the forces that shape our desire for newer devices.

Returning to the project several years later made me interested in a slightly different question. Rather than beginning with the moment a device becomes waste, I wanted to look further upstream: at the point when a phone that still works begins to feel old. The Phone That Was Fine Yesterday grew from that shift in perspective, revisiting some of the original concerns through the changing culture of newness, replacement, repair, reuse and recycling.

The original Buy, Throw, Repeat project can be viewed in my portfolio.

A NOTE ON THIS ARTICLE

REFERENCES

Apple (2026a) ‘Apple accelerates environmental progress with highest-ever recycled material in its products’, Apple Newsroom, 16 April. Available at: Apple Newsroom environmental update (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

Apple (2026b) ‘Apple debuts iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max’, Apple Newsroom, 9 September. Available at: Apple Newsroom iPhone 18 Pro announcement (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

Baldé, C.P., Kuehr, R., Yamamoto, T., McDonald, R., D’Angelo, E., Althaf, S., Bel, G., Deubzer, O., Fernandez-Cubillo, E., Forti, V., Gray, V., Herat, S., Honda, S., Iattoni, G., Khetriwal, D.S., Luda di Cortemiglia, V., Lobuntsova, Y., Nnorom, I., Pralat, N. and Wagner, M. (2024) The Global E-waste Monitor 2024. Geneva/Bonn: International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). Available at: The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

Baxter, J., Callewaert, P. and Danielsen, R. (2024) ‘Accounting the effects of product reuse and repair in life-cycle assessment’, Cleaner Engineering and Technology, 21, 100774. DOI 10.1016/j.clet.2024.100774.

Carvalho, D.L., Giannetti, B.F., Agostinho, F., Sulis, F. and Almeida, C.M.V.B. (2026) ‘The role of repair in the circular economy: Enhancing sustainability assessment through an integrated emergy-LCA framework’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 563, 148468. DOI 10.1016/j.jclepro.2026.148468.

Corrocher, N. and Paganuzzi, S. (2025) ‘Planned obsolescence and smartphone replacement: Empirical evidence on the Italian market’, Telecommunications Policy, 49(8), 103022. DOI 10.1016/j.telpol.2025.103022.

European Commission (2025) ‘Smartphones and tablets’, Energy Efficient Products. Available at: European Commission — Smartphones and Tablets (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

European Environment Agency (EEA) (2020) Europe’s consumption in a circular economy: the benefits of longer-lasting electronics. EEA Briefing No. 02/2020. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. EEA briefing (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

European Environment Agency (EEA) (2024) Product lifespans — monitoring trends in Europe. EEA Web Report No. 16/2024. EEA Product Lifespans report (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

European Environment Agency (EEA) (2025) ‘Design for durability of mobile phones’, Circularity Metrics Lab. Available at: EEA Circularity Metrics Lab (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

Google (2026) ‘The Pixel 11 series: Your most personal Pixel yet’, The Keyword, 12 August. Available at: Google Pixel 11 announcement (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

Hung, Y.W., Hsu, S.-C., Wiyata and Chiu, C.-M. (2026) ‘Upgrade or wait? An empirical investigation of users’ upgrading latest smartphone decisions’, Journal of Organisational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 36(3), pp. 195–214. DOI 10.1080/10919392.2026.2619312.

Kang, D. and Choi, M. (2025) ‘Factors associated with willingness to engage in responsible smartphone disposal behaviours: Towards user-centric policies for sustainable smartphone management’, Cleaner and Responsible Consumption, 18, 100301. DOI 10.1016/j.clrc.2025.100301.

Kouloumpis, V., Konstantzos, G.E., Chroni, C., Abeliotis, K. and Lasaridi, K. (2023) ‘Does the circularity end justify the means? A life cycle assessment of preparing waste electrical and electronic equipment for reuse’, Sustainable Production and Consumption, 41, pp. 291–304. DOI 10.1016/j.spc.2023.08.008.

Makov, T. and Fitzpatrick, C. (2021) ‘Is repairability enough? Big data insights into smartphone obsolescence and consumer interest in repair’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 313, 127561. DOI 10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.127561.

Mandler, T., Kupfer, A.-K., Hennig-Thurau, T., Schauerte, R. and Cziehso, G.P. (2025) ‘The contagious nature of pre-release consumer buzz: How observing other consumers’ anticipation for a new product influences adoption’, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 42(6), pp. 1044–1067. DOI 10.1111/jpim.12785.

Material Focus (2023) ‘Is FastTech the new Fast Fashion?’, Material Focus, October. Available at: Material Focus — FastTech research (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

Material Focus (2024) ‘Bank between £1,300 and £6,330 by re-selling your unused tech’, Material Focus, 31 January. Available at: Material Focus — unused tech research (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

Oraee, A., Pohl, L., Geurts, D. and Reichel, M. (2024) ‘Overcoming premature smartphone obsolescence amongst young adults’, Cleaner and Responsible Consumption, 12, 100174. DOI 10.1016/j.clrc.2024.100174.

Rao, R. and Turut, O. (2019) ‘New product preannouncement: Phantom products and the Osborne effect’, Management Science, 65(8), pp. 3776–3799. DOI 10.1287/mnsc.2018.3124.

Rosário, J.F.D. and Loureiro, S.M.C. (2021) ‘The effectiveness of e-word-of-mouth communication about smartphones purchase intention: digital influencer’, International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, 15(4), pp. 429–449. DOI 10.1504/IJIMA.2021.117567. DOI

Samsung Electronics (2026) ‘Galaxy Unpacked 2026: Highlights from Galaxy Unpacked: The beginning of truly agentic AI’, Samsung Global Newsroom, 26 February. Available at: Samsung Global Newsroom (Accessed: 23 September 2026).

Schreiner, T.F., Mandler, T., van Heerde, H.J. and Haiduk, C. (2025) ‘Dynamics of pre-release consumer buzz: Driving communication, search, and participation for market performance’, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 53(5), pp. 1261–1281. DOI 10.1007/s11747-024-01077-y.

Tseng, F.-M. and Chiang, H.-Y. (2013) ‘Exploring consumers to buy innovative products: Mobile phone upgrading intention’, The Journal of High Technology Management Research, 24(2), pp. 77–87. DOI 10.1016/j.hitech.2013.09.002.

Tseng, F.-M. and Lo, H.-Y. (2011) ‘Antecedents of consumers’ intentions to upgrade their mobile phones’, Telecommunications Policy, 35(1), pp. 74–86. DOI 10.1016/j.telpol.2010.11.003.

Wieser, H. and Tröger, N. (2018) ‘Exploring the inner loops of the circular economy: Replacement, repair, and reuse of mobile phones in Austria’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 172, pp. 3042–3055. DOI 10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.11.106.

Wilson, G.T., Smalley, G., Suckling, J.R., Lilley, D., Lee, J. and Mawle, R. (2017) ‘The hibernating mobile phone: Dead storage as a barrier to efficient electronic waste recovery’, Waste Management, 60, pp. 521–533. DOI 10.1016/j.wasman.2016.12.023.

© 2026

sezer@sezerali.com

Terms & Conditions