> 1 Figure
1,5 billion
Last year 1,5 billion of new smartphones were sold in the world.
There is an accumulation of devices due to personal and professional usages, perceived or real obsolescence, with poor collection and recycling of circulating smartphones.
Smartphones as a percentage of total mobile connections excluding cellular IoT in 2025:
Not only the number of smartphones is booming, but also carbon intensity of smartphones has increased every time that a new generation is launched. Richness of the smartphone’s features continues to increase, which leads to greater energy consumption during its production, particularly because of the extraction of an increasingly diverse range of metals. Producing a smartphone generates 400 times more GHG emissions than its utilization by Europeans.
Energy consumption of the terminal during its use also increases because of the use of more applications and data: a marker of this last trend is the fact that the recharging frequency of our smartphones remains more or less constant while the average battery power has increased by 50% in 5 years.