[kragen]

Your story is appalling, and I agree that this is a major problem.

However, drowning in e-waste from smartphones is many orders of magnitude from being an issue, as trivial calculations easily show. Mentioning it makes your argument rhetorically much weaker. The iPhone 16 is 147.6mm × 71.6mm × 7.8mm (8.2 × 10⁻⁵ m³) and weighs 170g, according to https://www.dimensions.com/element/apple-iphone-16-18th-gen. The population of France is 68.6 million people. One iPhone per person each year for the next century would be 6.86 billion iPhones in France, assuming the population remained constant. This would weigh 1.2 million tonnes and fit in a sphere 51 meters in diameter. If stacked 6 meters deep it would cover 9.4 hectares, a circle 340 meters in diameter. France contains 63 million hectares. The hypothetical pile of iPhones would cover about a third of the area of the Gravelines Nuclear Power Station near Calais.

Far from drowning in e-waste from smartphones, if you dump it in a landfill, it will be extremely hard even to find the e-waste without a map.

Even if you didn't have a countryside to bury e-waste in, this should be obvious even on the household scale. Suppose you and your four children each get a new iPhone every year, and instead of throwing them away, you put them in a box in the attic. How big is the box? It's a 35 cm cube after 100 years. It would weigh 85 kg, though, so you'd want to use several smaller boxes. But there is no risk of drowning.

[rixed]

"Drowning in e-waste" was a metaphor for "slowly destroying the conditions for civilisation with the violent obsession for more fossil fuel and more minerals to extract".

[kragen]

That's a bad metaphor, because those problems don't have anything significant in common with the e-waste problem, but there is no particular danger of smartphones being a major contributor to them, either. According to https://www.apple.com/nz/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPh... the emissions per iPhone 16 are 56 kg of CO₂ equivalent, 18% of which is the expected energy consumption during the life of the product. France emits 4.14 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year, so buying an extra iPhone per year would increase your total yearly CO₂ (equivalent) emissions by about 1%. Similarly, the quantity of minerals in a smartphone is insignificant (170 grams! largely recycled!) compared with the quantity of minerals in, for example, a sidewalk (many tonnes).

Some of those minerals, like the gold in the bond wires, are pretty heavily refined, requiring the excavation of some much larger amount of gangue and leaving most of it as tailings. But the total quantities of those minerals in the device are very small indeed. Instead, worry about things like electric vehicles and CO₂ emissions from making concrete.

What you are doing by attempting to reduce fossil fuel and other mineral usage by buying smartphones less frequently is analogous to attempting to pay the rent on a Paris apartment by looking for lost coins in the subway station, or attempting to take a running leap across the English Channel. You are doomed by your complete lack of understanding of the orders of magnitude involved.

[netdevphoenix]

> the emissions per iPhone 16 are 56 kg of CO₂ equivalent, 18% of which is the expected energy consumption during the life of the product

Are you counting the emissions produced to make it and all the packaging that comes with it, the vehicles used to transport it, lightning used in the warehouse where it sits and the appliances used to keep the warehouse clean too? Phones, just like anything else, are not made in a vaccuum

[kragen]

Apple says they are counting the emissions produced to make it and all the packaging that comes with it, the vehicles used to transport it, lighting used in the warehouse where it sits, and also the consumption of the device during its lifetime. You wouldn't want to count the carbon emissions of making the appliances used to keep the warehouse clean too because with that procedure the carbon emissions of anything would be infinite.

It ought to be obvious, but I'll say it anyway: the carbon emissions of shipping things like a smartphone are quite small, and the carbon emissions of things like warehouse lighting and warehouse cleaning are utterly insignificant.

[netdevphoenix]

"You wouldn't want to count the carbon emissions of making the appliances used to keep the warehouse clean too because with that procedure the carbon emissions of anything would be infinite." Problem is that this is the kind of loopholes orgs use to be able to get a lower number on reports. See country selling their waste to poorer countries. You don't have to necessarily fully map the true production chain but not counting the emissions of the tools used to produce, store and maintain the smartphones smells like cheating to me. All those tools will be contributing to carbon emissions and setting an arbitrary line only serves to push the responsibility of those emissions with someone else which is how we got into this whole environmental mess in the first place.

Obvious is just shorthand for unsubstantiated beliefs ime. What does "quite small" even mean? The iPhone carbon footprint is likely the lowest of all smartphones given Apple's efforts to look as green as possible. Your regular smartphone has almost double the carbot footprint at around 80kg. When you consider that most non-iPhone non-flagship smartphones become virtual bricks after 2-3 years, 80kg is a lot to me.

[rixed]

e-waste is very much linked with over-production, of which any particular product taken in isolation, be it iphone or tomatoes, is of course insignificant, the issue being the economy at large not iphones or Apple.

I don't know what's your point exactly? I was close to believe that this near perfect mix of naive quotation from Apple PR BS, computation of tons of minerals required to build a phone to the 5th decimal, and the lackadaisical insulting remarks, was some refined form of humor. But given we are on HN, you might just be this kind of engineer who can't see the forest for the tree.

So, assuming you are just inapropriately expressing a genuine concern that I might be mislead into believing that refraining oneself from buying any more phones is going to slow our society spiraling down into chaos, rest assured: I'm not believing this. My posture is all about principles, and holds for an iphone like for any of the many useless things a normal, modern life wants us to consume routinely, because I believe one should try to do the right thing no matter what, regardless of the odds of success, because proceeding otherwise requires to define success, an end goal, and that's a circular impossibility. Yes, as you can see, I'm with you on the spectrum. :-)

[kragen]

I am an engineer, and engineering is what is going to keep the planet habitable, not self-sacrifice. Engineering is based on calculating the costs and benefits of tradeoffs.

I do respect self-sacrifice on principled grounds. If you were starving in a besieged city, and killing and eating a baby were your best chance for survival (https://youtu.be/KOkBEqtGUI8?t=2886), I'd endorse you not doing it. Even if, in some utilitarian calculus, you were more important than the baby, I'd endorse your hypothetical non-baby-eating moral choice. I'd like to think that I'd be one of the people abstaining from lifesaving cannibalism myself, though I've often seen people fail to uphold their principles when it comes down to it. I respect drawing a line in the sand beyond which you refuse to coldly weigh costs and benefits like an engineer.

But that's not what you're doing. If not buying a smartphone were "all about principles" to you, you wouldn't have a smartphone in the first place. You've crossed the line in the sand; you're already eating babies. All that remains to you is balancing the number of babies you kill and eat against your nourishment.

And, in that situation, refusing to balance costs and benefits isn't a matter of principle. It's merely irresponsibility, and will result in you eating unnecessary quantities of babies.

[netdevphoenix]

> I am an engineer, and engineering is what is going to keep the planet habitable, not self-sacrifice. Engineering is based on calculating the costs and benefits of tradeoffs.

This is HN naivete at its best. Engineer-centric worldview directly inspired by Ayn Rand science fantasies with single-factor causality at its core.

Engineering happens in and is regulated by its surrounding socio-entrepreneurial-political context. Apple releasing Apple Intelligence is not exclusively an engineering decision. OpenAI releasing ChatGPT is not exclusively an engineering decision. The birth of the internet is not an exclusively engineering decision.

Every single one of those decisions involved more than just calculating costs and benefits of tradeoffs.

What is the difference between saying "I am an engineer" and "I work as an engineer" if we leave aside any desires to bind your personality to your employment contract?

[kragen]

I don't subscribe to a belief in single-factor causality. You can't do engineering with such a belief. Engineering is a discipline of bringing about desired effects, and that requires bringing about all of their necessary causes, not just one of them. If you attempt to operate a motor, a CPU, or an electroporation apparatus at the right voltage without paying attention to the temperature, or the right temperature without paying attention to the voltage, your design will have a bad problem and you will not be doing engineering today. And if you look at the motor's datasheet, you can see that the operating conditions have not just voltage and temperature but another dozen or two parameters.

But when you try to reduce a relationship in the infinitely complex and mostly unknown real world to a sentence, or even an essay or an encyclopedia, you have to simplify it. When you do this well, you can manage to say things that guide your readers toward the inexpressible and incompletely knowable truth, rather than away from it. You may even be able to figure out how to do something that you are trying to do.

To describe a bit more of the situation, among the unbounded complexity of the causal graph that has mostly eliminated the risk of global warming continuing, many of the critical nexuses are engineering achievements: the reduction of the resources required to manufacture solar panels to a tiny fraction of what they were only ten years ago, the construction and successful operation of solar panel factories that would already suffice to meet the human world's energy demands within decades, the similar improvements in rechargeable batteries, the not-yet-built solar farms that will deploy these panels, and so on.

These are ultimately causally dependent on nearly all of human history and especially on the political history of China, Germany, and Spain in the early 21st century and of the US in the late 20th. And the effects that will proceed from them are still largely unknown and unknowable, depending on future politics, but some of them are predictable; in particular, fossil fuels have become economically uncompetitive as a source of energy almost everywhere in the world, and will consequently decline over time. This may not be completely inevitable, but it is likely enough at this point that the alternatives are not worth worrying about.

You ask what it means to be an engineer if it's not just an employment contract, which makes me wonder if you have ever met an engineer. I have already given a partial answer: it is a way of thinking that seeks acceptable tradeoffs rather than perfection. I think it has a lot of other aspects as well. For example, engineers tend not to worry too much about factions with conflicting interests; we see life as a series of problems; we expect problems to be solved with enough knowledge and diligent hard work; we tend to value what is knowable and measurable over intuition, even as we depend unavoidably on intuition every day; we design things; our designs are based on material implications of inequalities (to compensate for the unknown unknowns in the world) rather than just equations; we respect expertise, especially expertise that can be put into words; we dare to imagine what has never been, and bring it into existence.

Contrast this with, for example, the worldview of a lawyer, or a doctor, or a mystic, or even a scientist.

Each of these aspects of being an engineer has good effects and bad effects, and sometimes the congenital blind spots of engineering thinking lead us into disasters. (Those blind spots don't bear much resemblance to your caricature of them, presumably because you know almost nothing about engineering, but they do exist and are very important.) But that's basically the way we have not only built the internet but also solved the climate change problem, including at the political level—you may have recognized Xi Jinping's good and bad points in the outline above.