5 reasons to hold on to that old clunker of a phone

https://mashable.com/article/keep-your-old-phone

Publish Date: 2026-04-22 05:07:00

I once had a manager who would run out on the first day a new iPhone was available, then show off his shiny new toy to all his underlings — who felt forced to ooh and ahh over its capabilities.

But I took the opposite path, holding onto my smartphones until they basically curled into a ball and died. My current device, an iPhone 13 Pro from 2022, still works great, except for the battery. It stopped getting juiced by wall chargers; then the car charger couldn’t perk it up. Now, only a charging cord plugged directly into my laptop will do the trick. Our separation draws near.

My reluctance to make a new purchase is partly anxiety about going to the Apple store, trying to remember my Apple ID, and then being hit with sticker shock over an iPhone 16 or 17. But there’s also pride in not succumbing to the fever that afflicted my former boss; there is a real benefit to the Earth, and yourself, in holding on to a clunker for as long as you can.

Here are five reasons why slowing your smartphone roll is good for everyone:

Environmental cost of a new smartphone

A modern smartphone is very complex hardware, requiring at least 70 elements — such as indium, nickel, and magnesium — to produce. The manufacturing process for smartphones (metal extraction, production, shipping), makes up 85 percent of the devices’ carbon footprint, according to FairPlanet.org.

Impoverished countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo bear a disproportionate cost of phone production. The DNR produces much of the cobalt used to make lithium-iron rechargeable batteries for smartphones, and their air, water, and trees suffer as a result. Congolese workers mining for cobalt often operate under brutal working conditions, as Siddharth Kara, a fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan…

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