Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 Recall Is an Environmental Travesty (vice.com) 145
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.
Environmental Wack Job (Score:5, Funny)
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Actually, asbestos isn't too big of a deal in most forms and/or infrequent exposure. It's when you start playing with the stuff like it's cotton candy and breathing it in in particulate form that things really go south. In most likeliness you're exposed to asbestos a few times a day with no clue that it's there but is allowed to be "grandfathered" in to building codes and such since the risks to human beings in many forms is minimal.
Most peoples' reaction to asbestos is about as reasonable as if you sued ev
FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I have to hand it to Samsung, they handled this entire situation extremely well. Most other companies would have kept trying to push their deathtrap devices (*cough* PowerBook hibachi *cough* iPod bomb *cough* iPhone bonfire *cough*), but Samsung did not hesitate to recall and pull the plug despite the fact that even with extensive testing, their techs could not make a Note 7 burst into flames.
Although the product was a complete flop, Samsung has shown flawless customer service and for that I will forever b
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...Samsung has shown flawless customer service and for that I will forever be a customer of theirs.
Yup! All those people who bought Samsung smart TV's, only to have adverts served up to them after new firmware was pushed out, sure got 'serviced' - just as a heifer is serviced by a bull.
Yes, Samsung handled this disaster as well as could be expected; maybe they had savvy advice, and maybe they got lucky. In either case, they sure didn't do it because it was right or honourable - they did it to save face and to minimize the number of lawsuits. If they could have done a GM-style cover-up I'm sure they would
Only 400 truckloads of materials (Score:3)
THe large mining trucks have payloads of 500 tonnes. 2 million phones at 165 pounds per phone is about 400 truck loads.
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And who cares how many truckloads it is anyway?
Obviously needs to change (Score:3)
Specially bad is in the case of the smartphones which most people replace within two years and have experienced huge growth in the last few years. Nowadays fewer and fewer PCs are built and people keep them for much longer than before. I hope that smartphones go in that direction too although I'm not optimistic about that since in my experience they seem to fail much earlier than PCs
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Why do they need to recycle them?
Once they find the root cause, they can come up with a process to refurbish the Note 7 stock and then quietly sell them as refurbs while they iterate to the Note 8 or whatever they want to call it... maybe skip straight to 10!
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That's an extremely capitalistic take on the issue. An equally capitalistic take would be that recycling needs to be cheaper than sourcing materials from the ground. I'm not really for or against either.
A better approach would be something along the lines of Apple's LIAM, where the philosophy is simply that old phones need to be recycled so that future manufacturing can be sustained if resources become unavailable or scarce.
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Y'know, you'd think from TFA that we're awash in a sea of smart-phones/tablets in landfills.
So, assuming all 100M+ Galaxy S4's were in landfills, with absolutely nothing recycled, we'd have a landfill with 13Mg of smartphones. Which is less than 20% of the annual debris produced mining aluminum (aluminium for you Brits).
And that pales to insignificance beside the debris produced annually by coal mining, much less burning the coal. Or making steel with it....
Note that that entire run of S4's amounts to
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Which is less than 20% of the annual debris produced mining aluminum (aluminium for you Brits).
And everyone else who isn't American...
20m Cube, Off by ~20% NOT a factor of 5 (Score:2)
W: 142 Phones x136.6mm == 19397.2mm
H: 2533 Phones x 7.9mm == 20010.7mm
AND:
278x142x2533 == 99,992,708
278x142x2534 == 100,032,184
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Standardizing parts would help a lot. In this case, for example, it's a lot of screens and such that have nothing to do with the problem that SHOULD be going into the spare parts bins for repairs.
Is this for the one guy who kept hist Galaxy 7? (Score:2)
Standardizing parts would help a lot. In this case, for example, it's a lot of screens and such that have nothing to do with the problem that SHOULD be going into the spare parts bins for repairs.
Is this for the one guy who kept hist Galaxy 7?
You know, so he can replace the parts every 5 -7 days as it catches on fire?
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With the payload in question, it just makes sense for Samsung to get to the bottom of the failure, and rework the phones. There are too many for an effort of that sort not to be made. Once that issue is resolved, they can decide to rework them if they like, and sell them again.
Obviously, because of the hysteria, and the uncertainty at this point, they all had to be withdrawn from the use immediately, but that is for now. It's worth putting a team of engineers on the project when there is a billion dollar
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The problem is the battery and the fact that the battery is not user-replaceable.
If they wanted to salvage the phones, they could design a new case to accommodate a replaceable battery. Disassemble the phone, put it in the new case with a new good replaceable battery and they should be good to go. Seems a much better solution than just trashing the phones.
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1. Collect all 2.5 million devices into one place
2. Remove all batteries and recycle them
3. Connect all battery-less phones to wall power
4. Connect all phones together into world's biggest Beowulf Cluster
5. Mine Bitcoins
6. Profit!
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It's been widely reported that the problem is the battery itself which develops an internal short... nothing to do with the rest of the phone.
A replaceable battery is not required for the fix but would give the battery more protection and would be easier to change if a problem did develop.
BTW, I prefer phones with replaceable batteries for longevity (don't have to have an expensive repair to replace the battery) and it gives me the option of changing the battery when it runs low and I can't charge. It seems
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Well, if we STANDARDIZED as I was saying, those screens would likely fit other phones. Rather than being landfill.
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We can make recycling more profitable in an instant - simply raise the prices of raw materials 10 fold. Just a wee little political problem. President Trump will get right on it, I'm sure.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Right. So somebody can continue to supply OS updates to phones that are regularly catching on fire. The problem is that Samsung made a lot of phones that are physically dangerous, and doesn't have a good way to recycle them, not that the OS is getting old.
There's lots of legalities involved in opening up code, and it wouldn't do much good. Updating the OSes would happen to a few phones, but it would be a lot of work and few people would pay for it. Sometimes people just like their old phones and woul
Or, you know... (Score:3)
Use them for VR, turn them into SBCs, sell them as USB-powered dev kits... there's plenty of uses for such a marvel of technology that do not require an onboard battery.
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And that would pass legal muster? Can you just imagine what the VP of marketing would think of this?
While this is a perfectly reasonable technical solution, the Spreadsheet Folks are just going to say bury the damned things, fire a few people and get on with it.
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I once bought a case of animated christmas light strings that would overheat and catch on fire. They'd snipped off all the power transformers so you'd at least have to know something to power them up. I replaced the transistors on the controller with higher power ones and they work beautifully.
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Use them to power in-store advertising displays (sans battery) or kiosks. Tablet devices being used for this purpose already and their screen is almost as large.
Re:Or, you know... (Score:4, Funny)
What, for fire sales?
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If you remove the battery and power by AC adapter.
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All modern phones have a removable battery.
But don't expect to reuse the phone or the battery after that !
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really (Score:1)
the rate we purchase new phones, when the ones we have already are more than adequate, is a bigger travesty. so the note 7 had an accelerated eol, i think if people should be more concerned with the motto we learned when we were young, reduce/reuse/recycle, and actually do that instead of "oh new shiny, must get" fucking people
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the rate we purchase new phones, when the ones we have already are more than adequate, is a bigger travesty. so the note 7 had an accelerated eol, i think if people should be more concerned with the motto we learned when we were young, reduce/reuse/recycle, and actually do that instead of "oh new shiny, must get" fucking people
Now there's the answer, it seems: Use the things longer. You don't need a new phone every year. Oooh ... iPhone 7 .... gotta have it .... until the iPhone 8 comes out 12 months later.
Keep them until they wear out. Yes, there's an issue with limited recharging cycles ... but replaceable batteries should be the norm. Yes, there's an issue with software updates .... vendors need to be more responsible about that.
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Yes, there's an issue with software updates .... vendors need to be more responsible about that.
Vendors are. Cell carriers aren't. Without a new shiny, how are they supposed to lock you into a new contract for another 18 months, until the next new shiny comes out?
Everything is predicated on locking a customer into your business, in order to reduce customer acquisition costs. It costs a heck of a lot more to acquire a customer than it does to lock them into a contract so you can retain them.
Without this aspect of the business model, both your cell phone costs and your service costs go up. The phon
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First released October 22, 2015; 11 months ago
Discontinued October 4, 2016
New Mexico? (Score:1)
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"Aaah, ET now phone home ... *BOOM*
Offshore the recycling (Score:3)
If they aggregate millions of identical phones and ship them by the pallet load to India/China/CheapLaborVille, I suspect it can become economical to recycle most of the goods. This is especially true if the people doing it aren't concerned with pesky OSHA type regulations from an overbearing government concerned with foolish things like employee health.
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It's scary that they can't figure out the cause. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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> . 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.
Apple already does; their response is that third-party USB chargers are to blame.
Which of course is false, since USB chargers' job is to provide 5VDC (aside from QC which can provide higher voltages at request of the device), that's all; the USB charger will keep supplying 5VDC as long as it is connected. It is the device's job
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Very few Apple phones have gone up in smoke, and for the few that have the cause has been physical damage. Usually people putting their phones in their back pockets and sitting on them. The repeated stress of your entire body weight compressing and twisting the phone eventually damages the battery and causes the fire.
Even then, the number of fires has been so small that it's not a statistically relevant problem.
Re:It's scary that they can't figure out the cause (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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... and trusting national regulators to enforce...
Hooray for regulations! I'm not being funny here, it just seems that more and more people these days seem to believe that regulation = bad, and that'd we'd all be better off living in the jungle. Regulations are what keep most of us alive, so it's good to see this recognised once in a while :)
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Was on a Alaska flight from SEA to SNA yesterday morning and the flight crew did mention the 7's and to keep them turned off at all times, no charging.
That said, I'm not too worried about open flames in a small space on an airliner (see below.) It wasn't that long ago we had smoking-sections and before that, non-smoking sections. (And before that, what the hell are you talking about?)
One note though. I work for a company that makes the cabins for airliners and there is a whole lot of Flammability testing
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The chance of surviving a cabin fire is pretty slim.
Citation? There's oxygen for each passenger and fire extinguishers. Plus everything is made to be non-flammable.
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I'll post my reply here, but there are a few other sibling posters asking similar questions.
This report [skybrary.aero] collates historical data on in-flight fires. From the report: "Fire in the air is one of the most hazardous situations that a flight crew can be faced with. Without aggressive intervention by the flight crew, a fire on board an aircraft can lead to the catastrophic loss of that aircraft within a very short space of time. Once a fire has become established, it is unlikely that the crew will be able to exti
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The fact that they can't determine why these phones are going up in smoke is scary.
I don't for a moment think that they can't figure it out. I'm inclined to believe they have figured it out and:
a) The repair would required a re-run of the motherboard or
b) The second recall to fix the problem has tarnished the brand irrevocably.
To be honest the writing was on the wall for the Note 7 when airlines started telling people to not use them announcing them in airports. They say that there's no such thing as bad advertising, but "they" are wrong. This is just cutting losses.
Expect a Note 8 to be
They already know the cause. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That said, the charging circuit could still be at fault.
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So, what does happen in a case like this? (Score:2)
Clearly Samsung can't sell these as-is anymore; but by all reports the problem is with the battery(or possibly with the case not protecting the battery properly); not the logic board or the screen. Given that, it seems crazy to be talking about recycling them(even if we had nearly perfect methods), when the most expensive components are still fully functional.
I imagine that market-cannibalization/brand dilution/etc. concerns might interfere
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swap in a somewhat bigger and uglier, but non-explosive, battery
You wouldn't even have to do that. Just power it with a 5V AC adapter. There are plenty of applications in that size that don't need to be portable. I'd buy one to use as a kitchen-mounted media player for the right price.
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1) Buy all of the junked Note 7's for a song
2) Put a cover on the back that holds a bunch of rechargeable AA cells
3) Advertise here on Slashdot and sell a couple to everybody whose always wanted a replaceable battery and a thicker phone.
4) As a bonus, you can push it as 1980's retro and grab a few more of the 'get off my lawn' crowd here.
5) Profit!
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4) As a bonus, you can push it as 1980's retro and grab a few more of the 'get off my lawn' crowd here.
I see a flaw with this step in your plan: Casio is unlikely to license their logo and trademark.
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There's good news (Score:3)
They won't clog up the landfills. They'll burn them down.
Reuse would be better (Score:2)
I would think that Samsung, which makes a huge range of products, could find one where they could integrate the failed tablets after removing the battery. People have talked about integrating touch screens with refrigerators. Now that can at minimal cost. Or turn them into hard-wired wall-mounted touch screens. I would love to see them for all the conference rooms at my office, set to display who has reserved the room and for how long.
The point is that there are all kinds of things these could be used f
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Cellphone powered generator (Score:2)
We could always burn the cellphones if there isn't space in the landfill.
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Line Em Up (Score:2)
Like something that resembles a diet coke and mentos video, line em up with some type of rube goldberg configuration and video tape what happens when one of them explodes!
sell to the military (Score:2)
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Or worse: telemarketers.
They are not "lost" (Score:2)
None of the stuff in the phones is "lost". It's not like those phones are sent off planet. They're sent to a dump. And it's less commercially viable to "mine" these elements there than from the natural deposit.
At some point in the future, when extracting those materials from the earth becomes more and more expensive, recycling those phones, i.e. "mining the dump" becomes economically viable. So think of the future generations and dump them in one place, so your grandchildren have a chance to hit the jackpot
Call Liam (Score:3)
Can send them to Apple for their disassembly robot.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/27/... [fortune.com]
"No disassembly Stephanie!" -obligatory Short Circuit reference.
At 1.2 million phones a year it should just take a little over 2 years for Liam to do all 2.5m... assuming one could be tweaked to work with the SGN7.
Travesty? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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."
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The root of a word is not necessarily its current meaning.
I "understand" your comment, but I am not standing beneath it looking up at its workings!
It takes roughly 165 pounds... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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"...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.
Absolutely. Considering that of the 165 pounds of raw mined materials, 164.625 pounds were waste regardless. There's no way that a 6 ounce slab of plastic, copper, and rare earths is made out of 165 pounds of completely good stuff. Nobody's throwing out 164+ pounds of copper once they're done extracting a cell phone out of it, for instance.
No. Sorry. While the energy costs and dirty chemicals used in the process of creating the phones is a shame, fact is we're looking at 2 million times 6 ounces wort
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fact is we're looking at 2 million times 6 ounces worth of useful materials. Or... a total of 750,000 pounds. 375 (US) tons. 256.7 Toyota Prius cars. A single (50-year-old model) Boeing 747.
And that's assuming it is all binned, which it isn't. Screens, processor, RAM, battery cells etc can all get re-used on other devices, and precious metal can be recovered. Most of the waste will be plastic.
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I think the point is that for every phone that is being returned, one additional phone will be purchased that would not otherwise have happened.
Therefore an additional 164+ pounds of raw material will need to be mined per phone, waste or not.
That is a problem for the environment.
oblig (Score:2)
Everything's a fucking travesty with you man!
There is still a market for the returned phones... (Score:2)
FFS Motherboard (Score:2)
"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."
We do know how to recycle smartphones. Apple even made a fancy robot called Liam to do it (where the impressive thing is that it does disassembly, which means a much higher rate of recovery of usable materials than standard methods). This is not an issue of skill but will.
better than explosions (Score:1)
Whilst landfill is a horrible waste for these smartphones letting them explode is going to be far more damaging to the environment.
Samsung should be put under pressure to find a way to reuse the other parts and dispose of the batteries another way.
The issue seemed to be more that the batteries where not configured right than inherently dangerous so its possible a reconfiguration could be done with them.
What about all those note 7 accessories? (Score:1)
Make a Super Computer (Score:2)
These phones are absolutely safe if the battery is removed and they are powered by a wired supply.
Give them to researchers to create a cell-phone supercomputer or other possible projects.
Sell it to ISIS (Score:2)
There is one big market for exploding stuff that just can't get enough of it.