Old Retired Pixel Phones Find Their Place in Retirement

With support from Google, Researchers at the University of California San Diego are building a useful second-life for consumer smartphones:

The carbon footprint of computing is a key sustainability challenge. It is driven by two major sources: operational carbon reflects emissions from energy consumed during use, and embodied carbon encompasses emissions associated with hardware manufacturing. While operational carbon is often addressed with efforts such as improved energy efficiency and using clean energy, the manufacturing footprint represents a more complex hurdle.

To address this, researchers at the University of California San Diego are building a pathway for the second life of phones through the exploration of “phone cluster computing.” This is a process whereby the motherboards of retired smartphones are extracted, collected into clusters, and redeployed as a general-purpose computing platform. With Google’s support, the university plans to deploy a datacenter built from 2,000 Pixel smartphones that will provide hundreds of researchers and students with low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing, reducing the need for newly-manufactured hardware and their associated emissions.

We’ve grown accustomed to measuring a phone’s lifespan by how long it holds a charge or how fast it loads an app. But this project completely flips the script on electronic waste. The next time you upgrade your device, recycling your old Pixel might just be donating to a tiny piece of tomorrow's internet.