^{Americans replace their smartphone once every 2-3 years on average, with a recent report from Statista citing a lifespan at around 2.6 years. 5} Billions of mobile devices are discarded annually. According to the International Forum on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, ¹² in 2022, 5.3 billion phones worldwide were expected to become waste.

^{Most often, a mobile device’s life begins in a mine, where raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, copper, and aluminum are extracted, often at heavy environmental detriment. Once extracted, these raw materials are transferred to refining factories and become batteries, wires, circuitry, and other components of mobile phones. These components will then be transferred to a manufacturing factory where they will be assembled into complete mobile phones. This process is already environmentally taxing — an estimated 146 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions are released yearly through the manufacturing process of the world’s cellular phones and smartphones. 6}

^{At the opposite end of their life cycle, these mobile devices (and many other devices that contribute to e-waste) may enter a landfill, where they can leach highly toxic material (arsenic, lead, mercury, and more) into groundwater, disrupting ecosystems and communities. 7}Recycling e-waste is a promising alternative, as promoted by the Be Nice to Your Device public safety campaign from ULRI’s Electrochemical Safety Research Institute; however, more than 80% of e-waste is not currently being recycled properly. ² As of 2024, 25 U.S. states (and the District of Columbia) currently have e-waste recycling laws, but the results of enforcement have been mixed. ¹¹

Recycling is just one piece of the puzzle on increasing sustainability of mobile phones, where consumers and producers need to consider many factors, including repairability of phones, packaging, end-of-life programs, corporate responsibilities, and responsible use of raw materials. The life cycle chain of a cellphone goes beyond manufacturers, who are the producers and potential end-of-life recyclers, and includes waste management companies, recyclers, regulators, and many other stakeholders. How then can eco-conscious consumers, mobile phone producers, and the overall public help reverse this trend of e-waste piling up by the millions of tons per year?

^{At first, manufacturers struggled to become certified to IEEE 1680.1 but soon met the gold certification rating at a much higher rate, with more than 2,000 registered products reaching gold status by 2011. 9}The need for manufacturers and standards technical professionals to work together is greater than ever before, and a willingness for manufacturers to seek certification of their products to meet sustainability standards is critical for preventing environmental damage. Some actions a cellphone manufacturer could take to be more sustainable and reduce e-waste include the following: 

• Using recycled materials in their packaging and products
• Encouraging individuals to have their electronics professionally repaired instead of purchasing new phones and recycling or trashing their old ones
• Reusing recycled materials to build new phones
• Keeping raw materials out of landfills
• Discouraging the need for harvesting new materials from the earth

According to Proctor, ⁸ manufacturers have sought the highest profit margins, which led to users being restricted from having their devices repaired, but Apple has recently reversed this decision and is encouraging users to have their mobile phones repaired. ³Because of Apple’s actions and leadership, more manufacturers may see value in adopting strategies that lead to decreasing e-waste generation. Additionally, if the public was made more aware of sustainability standards that hold manufacturers to a transparent measurement, the issue of e-waste will become more front and center in the conversations around mobile phones. Companies may become incentivized to consider the sustainability of their products and adopt practices that increase profit while also reducing e-waste.

The first technical committee (TC) of UL 110, the Standard for Sustainability for Mobile Phones, included 25 people, representing various interest categories and organizations, including the following:

• Apple
• Motorola
• Samsung
• Blackberry
• Dell
• LG
• HP
• Intel
• AT&T
• Best Buy
• UL Solutions
• UL Standards & Engagement
• U.S. Department of Energy
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Building from a first draft, the TC went through a series of commenting and revision stages before voting on the first edition of the standard. Many standards allow manufacturers to reach different levels of certification, and UL 110 follows this pattern by allowing mobile phone producers to be “certified” or “platinum,” based on their achievements toward sustainability. Some key considerations included in the standard cover the following topics: 

• Supply chain management of materials
• The sustainable use of raw materials (including plastics, bio-based content, and postconsumer recycled content)
• Energy use limits
• Substances of concern
• Life cycle assessment
• End-of-life management (including recyclability and repairability based on battery removal, data erasure management, and consistent plastic being used throughout the device)
• Recyclability of packaging (by incorporating recycled fibers, recycled plastics, and environmentally preferable paperboard packaging)
• Corporate sustainability

Eventually, through multiple rounds of open comments (during which anyone can submit comments for the TC to consider and vote on), and changes in the TC (members from Google and FOXCONN joined, while several U.S. government and major corporate representatives left, including LG and Blackberry), the first edition of UL 110, the Standard for Sustainability for Mobile Phones, was published in 2011. While a few of these TC members are no longer voting members, some are still involved in the standards development process and continue to provide comments and proposals for further editions of the standard. In 2017, the second edition of the standard was published, and as of 2024 the third edition is currently being worked on by the TC and ULSE. Some proposed changes to the standard help ensure the standard maintains industrywide rigorous standards towards increasing sustainability, such as adding optional criteria of eliminating cadmium and beryllium in mobile phones and required criteria that all conflict minerals (3TG) be sustainable and ethically sourced.

If a manufacturer achieved 55% of the available points, the device is certified, but if the device received 73% of the available points, the manufacturer will achieve platinum certification. Back in 2013, Friedman reported Samsung achieving platinum certification for its Galaxy S4 — many more devices have also obtained platinum certification. The standard itself has both required criteria and optional criteria that boost the score. The more recent second version modifies this achievement criteria to bronze, silver, and gold levels of certification. To reach the bronze achievement, manufacturers must hit all required criteria; to reach silver, they must hit all required criteria, as well as 50% of the available optional points; and to reach gold, they must hit all required criteria, along with 75% of the available optional points.

One required criterion involves the substances of concern that make up the materials of the phone. Materials in the phone and battery, such as cadmium, mercury, lead, and other metals and organic substances that are susceptible to leaching into the environment and causing harm, are restricted from exceeding a maximum concentration value (MCV) set by the European Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive 2002/96/EC. The following MCVs are indicated in UL 110: 

• Cadmium: 100 parts per million (ppm)
• Mercury: 1,000 ppm
• Lead: 1,000 ppm
• Hexavalent chromium (which is a known carcinogen¹): 1,000 ppm
• Polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE): 1,000 ppm
• Nickel release rate from the phone’s exterior: 0.5 micrograms per cubic centimeter of surface area per week

Batteries are required to be able to be removed at the end of the phone’s lifespan by qualified repair service providers or authorized repair providers; they may also be removed by users if the batteries are designed to be removable and replaceable by the user without the use of any tools as an optional requirement. This provides benefits for the sustainability of the raw materials required to create new batteries and helps consumers avoid replacing the entire phone when they only need to replace the battery.

For the phone’s packaging, neither expanded polystyrene packaging (Styrofoam is a trademarked brand of this material), nor heavy metals more than 100 ppm total may be used. Finally, all manufacturers must disclose their corporate environmental health and safety statements for anyone to see, whether this is on a website, an annual report, a sustainability report, or other dissemination source. Optional requirements allow a manufacturer to boost its score to achieve certification or platinum certification. An example of an optional achievement is the manufacturer conducting a Life Cycle Assessment of its product in alignment with ISO 14040, a standard that provides frameworks for understanding the environmental impacts of a product’s entire life cycle. For UL 110, a manufacturer needs to provide a statement of impact for how its product impacts global warming, ocean acidification, eutrophication, ozone depletion, photochemical smog formation, and primary energy demand. Organizations can go one step further in this analysis by having an independent peer review of their Life Cycle Assessments, and by addressing the results of these assessments into their corporate sustainability plans.