The Second Life of Smartphones: Building a Greener Future from the Scrap Heap

I’ve been in the Baltic States this week, so have been catching up on what some of the finest minds have been thinking about and working on.

So: here’s a preview of some ingenious work that has just been done by a team that included a group of scholars from the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science in Estonia.

Every year, the world throws away more than 50 million tonnes of electronic waste - much of it made up of devices that still work. 5.3 billion handsets were expected to be thrown away a couple of years ago That’s a staggering amount.

At the same time, the hunger for computing power is growing exponentially. AI, edge computing, surveillance systems, smart cities and more: all demand energy and require infrastructure. Some of the estimates for both are mind-boggling.

So what if there was a way to square the circle - in other words to take what we already have, what we’ve discarded, and breathe new life into it by turning e-waste smartphones into ‘tiny data centres.’

At first glance, the idea sounds almost too clever to be serious. But it’s precisely that: clever, serious, and surprisingly effective. By repurposing old smartphones (in this case, obsolete Nexus 5 models), researchers were able to create small-scale computing units that could be deployed for edge applications: monitoring sensors, powering smart toys, enabling 3D printing control systems, and even coordinating autonomous vehicles.

For a total cost of under €10 per unit, these old devices were made usable again - not as phones, but as low-power processors embedded in a new kind of infrastructure.