Faulty Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Phones Present E-Waste Recycling Issue, Opportunity

Samsung is now gathering up the millions of discontinued and recalled Galaxy Note 7 smartphones sold around the world, with the help of retailers, ground transportation companies, and kits that include safety gloves and multiple layers of fireproof boxes. Yet that’s just the first step in retiring all of those devices. “Recycling” smartphones still usually means recycling their parts into a refurbished phone, not recycling the phone’s materials into a new phone or another object.

Motherboard points out that this could have been avoided if the Galaxy Note 7 had a user-removable battery like its predecessors. Samsung still isn’t quite sure what makes the device so flammable, but if it turns out to be the battery after all, users could have simply swapped out their current batteries for non-defective ones. If Samsung had ever figured out how to make non-defective Note 7 batteries, that is.