Are you stupid? Let’s say we have 1000 people and they all want the latest phone, all manufactured phones get bought and everyone sells their old phones. And phones don’t break.

Scenario 1: Every year 200 new phones get released.

• Year 1. 200 most willing to pay the highest price buy a new phone, 800 are without a phone
• Year 2. The same 200 buy the latest model and sell their old one. The next 200 get the “new” used phone. 600 are without phones.
• Year 3, 4 and 5 I imagine are self-explanatory. By the end of year 5 everyone has phone.
• Year 6. The most willing buy the 200 new phones and sell their old phone. The next group buy the previous group phones and sell their current phone. The last group has nobody to sell to because nobody wants their phone. 200 phones go into e-waste.
• Year 7. Goes like year 6 except now there’s a total of 400 phones in e-waste.
• Year 8, 9 and 10 follow the same pattern. By the end of year 10 there 1000 phones in e-waste.
• Year 20. By the end of the year there will be 3000 phones in e-waste.

Scenario 2: 100 phones get released (to better stimulate the real world because someone is going release a phone anyway, but you can also imagine 200 phones releasing every 2 years as the numbers will the same for every even year).

• Year 1. 100 people get a phone.
• Year 2. 100 people buy the new phone and sell the old one. 100 people buy the old phone.
• Years 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are the same pattern. By the end of year 10 everyone has a phone
• Year 11 the first year phones go into e-waste because nobody wants them. Total 100 phones in e-waste.
• Year 12 the next 100 phones go into waste. Total 200 phones in e-waste.
• Years 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 are the same pattern.
• Year 20. By the end of the year 1000 phones are e-waste.
• Year 40. By the end of the year 3000 phones are e-waste.

It literally cannot be empirically untrue because what I said is mathematically true. Let’s say that in both scenario 1 and scenario 2 at the end of year 50 they decide to throw away all phones and never create another phone again. In scenario 1 there would be 10 000 e-waste phones. In scenario 2 there would be 5000 e-waste phones. The more you create the more waste will come down the line. If you want less waste, make less phones.

And before you go “but recycling?” only about 20% of e-waste gets recycled and the recycling process doesn’t recycle all the waste.