Apple publish high-quality, audited environmental impact reports for all their products. A 64gb iPhone 8 produces the equivalent of 57kg of CO2 across the entire product lifespan, from manufacturing to recycling.
A return flight from LAX to JFK produces ~580kg of CO2; the climate impact is equivalent to ~1100kg of CO2, because emissions at altitude have a greater warming effect.
Driving 10,000 miles in a typical sedan or crossover SUV emits about 3000kg of CO2; in a large pickup like a Ford F150, that figure is closer to 4500kg.
The food consumption of the average US household results in equivalent CO2 emissions of 8100kg.
Our carbon emissions are dominated by heating and cooling, transport and food. Keeping your phone for another couple of years is a rounding error in the scheme of things - it's equivalent to a two-hour car journey or a good restaurant meal. If we are to stand any chance of limiting the impact of climate change, we need to make big, difficult choices about our lifestyle.
We need to massively reduce the amount we drive and fly. We need to redesign homes to require less active heating and cooling. We need far more sustainable electricity generation. We need to radically alter our diets and our approach to agriculture, with far less meat and dairy consumption. This will be difficult, expensive and politically unpopular, but it's the only way we'll make a meaningful impact.
https://images.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPh...
https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3
I mean, building a smartphone involves digging for raw materials, extract them, transport them, assemble them, etc. And i'm not counting the emission during the design process.
I know that a two-hour car journey is really not optimized, and that manufacturing phones on a large scale is very optimized, but it seems impossible to me that manufacturing a phone in China from components from all over the world emits less that a good big steak in a restaurant... I that's true, that's incredible.
Someone had to build a giant platform in the ocean, drill a hole deep into the ground, pump the oil out of the ground and move it ashore, boil it in a giant distiller to extract the gasoline, pump it into a tanker and drive it to your gas station. All of that stuff is invisible, but you notice the gram of polythene wrapping on a cucumber.
A phone is an incredibly sophisticated device, but it's only a few ounces of stuff. It cost you $700, so it feels like it should involve a huge amount of natural resources to make. It required a lot of human skill and ingenuity, but we didn't need to burn a lot of stuff to make it. When you fill up your tank with $50 of unleaded, you don't think about the huge volume of pure hydrocarbons you're pouring into your car or the immensely energy-intensive processes needed to extract, refine and transport that fuel.
When you get on a plane, you don't think about the fact that almost the entire volume of the wings are filled with fuel that'll be burned in a single journey. When your heating thermostat clicks on, you don't think about the volume of gas rushing through a network of pipes to feed your boiler.
Two cans of soda take more energy to make. (Because metals are extremely energy intensive to refine and recycle.)
The main environmental killers are still means of transport. A car is a ton of metal... Housing also demands plenty of energy in materials.
They're sent to other countries by ship, also in bulk. Efficient but slow.
Even the last mile transport does not look bad there.
The main rare material in phones is actually lithium and that has some indirect impact - we could use it in cheaper batteries for solar and wind instead.
In fact, using homebrew solutions or alternative sources actually increases my environmental footprint. Now I'm not only wasting the goods that were created in preparation for me (phone, meat etc), I'm consuming more goods from an alternative source that is small and can more readily adjust for demand, which it does, by providing for me. Which has a further non-zero environmental impact.
So in the short turn (year over year) its actually best to consume only the mainstream sources of goods since their marginal cost is about zero. Whether that seems tragic or efficient is up to the reader.
Ten years ago, the market for grass-fed beef and organic vegetables was negligible. Consumer demand induced the agricultural industry to start shifting towards production techniques with a lower environmental impact.
Consumer demand matters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Unite...
Our focus should also be on cutting energy spendings & reducing transportation, and stop buying new phones (and laptops and tvs etc..) every now and then sure will help, will it not?