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Generation estimation and metals recycling potentials evaluation of retired mobile phones in Korea

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Abstract

The goal of this work is to evaluate generation and metals recycling potentials of retired mobile phones in Korea. The generation estimation is conducted with the sales&new method and statistic data, such as sales of mobile phones and amount of the subscribers. The result shows that there are 17.99 million of mobile phones retired in 2022, compared 13.12 million in 2001. Accordingly, the deduced lifetime has minimum and maximum values in 2003 and 2020, which are 2.02 and 4.33 years, compared with 4.16 years in 2022 and 2.21 years in 2001. The deduced lifetime trends to increase with the increased values of subscribers and the fluctuated values of sales. The crosscheck testifies to the veracity of the result in comparison with the actual condition. The amount and dynamic of critical metals are also calculated with the content and amount of retired mobile phones.

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Data availability

The data sets used during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the honored editors and referees for their hard work and selfless help.

Funding

This research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFC3901705); the Science Research Project of Hebei Education Department (QN2023216); Sichuan Research Center for Mineral Resources (SCKCZY2023-YB004); the S&T Program of Xingtai (2022ZZ094) and Xingtai Polytechnic College (202304).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Resources and Environmental Engineering, Xingtai Polytechnic College, Xingtai, 054000, China

    Ang Li & Bo Li

  2. Hebei Key Laboratory of Man-Machine Environmental Thermal Control Technology and Equipment, Xingtai Polytechnic College, Xingtai, 054000, China

    Ang Li & Bo Li

  3. School of Mathematics and Information Technology, Xingtai University, Xingtai, 054000, China

    Huibin Wang & Xia Liu

  4. Department of Educational Science and Teaching, Xingtai University, Xingtai, 054000, China

    Yanan Guo

  5. Department of Education, Woosuk University, Wanju, 55338, Korea

    Yanan Guo

  6. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

    Bin Lu

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  1. Ang Li
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  2. Bo Li
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  3. Huibin Wang
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  4. Xia Liu
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Contributions

Ang Li: conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, writing—original draft, visualization. Bo Li: conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, writing—review and editing, visualization. Huibin Wang: resources, writing—review and editing. Xia Liu: resources, writing—review and editing. Yanan Guo: writing—review and editing. Bin Lu: conceptualization, funding acquisition, writing—review and editing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Bo Li.

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Li, A., Li, B., Wang, H. et al. Generation estimation and metals recycling potentials evaluation of retired mobile phones in Korea. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 110481–110488 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-30074-x

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