Incentivising Waste
Big Tech is finding new ways to drive useless consumption
This is a guest post from Alex Hobson, an amazing British writer and content creator who holds an MA in Global Development and International Political Economy. He has a Substack newsletter (subscribe here) and a Youtube channel that both use ordinary, everyday examples to analyse politics and the economy from a working-class perspective.
I have an email from February that is promoting the Pixel 10; you can get £610 back with an eligible phone trade-in, which includes a £200 bonus.
This represents a shift away from the classic contract model, where you get your device and airtime plan together from a network provider like EE or Vodafone.
In February 2026, Google introduced “instant trade-in” for Pixel purchases via the Google Store, where the estimated trade-in value is applied as an upfront discount at checkout rather than a refund later.
This is designed explicitly to remove as much friction as possible from buying a handset directly from Google, in what is called a “direct-to-consumer” (DTC) model.
DTC brings lots of benefits for Google: they hold the customer relationship, can get a higher margin on each unit, and they have direct control over their pricing and promotions. For a company like Google, this is essential, as their phones are a crucial component in their wider service ecosystem, such as Gemini, Photos, email, etc.
Now, on the surface, this looks like a sensible, savvy, and sustainable practice, right?
Sustainable Marketing
If Google were to sell me a discounted new phone that would incentivise me to upgrade, I’d have to figure out what to do with my old phone, which means I’m probably going to leave it sitting in a drawer in the kitchen until I next move house. Google’s own website states:
Building products
for the planet.
And for everyone.
“From product design to manufacturing and across our supply chains, we are working to address our environmental and social impact at every step”.1
They have 2 schemes,
The Recycling Programme
The website states: “Our recycling programme keeps reusable materials out of landfill. That means less waste for the planet and less clutter for you.”2
Refurbish and Re-sell
What exactly they do with your old phone is quite opaque; Google’s website doesn’t actually say.
Google make a phone, and if their marketing and trade-in mechanism has worked, you will give it back to them 12 months later, at which point they will “refurbish” it and sell it on to someone who didn’t get caught up in the 12-month marketing trap.
But how sustainable is this practice? How effective is recycling, and is this model actually doing anything to make smartphones more environmentally friendly?
The Anatomy of Smartphones
The number of phones in circulation is increasing exponentially year on year, until eventually they’re too old to function and are broken down into parts. As of 2022,. there were more than 8.58 billion mobile subscriptions in use worldwide in 2022, compared to a global population of 7.95 billion halfway through the year.3
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for every million smartphones you recycle, you can recover:
16.2 tonnes of copper
0.35 tonnes of silver
0.034 tonnes of gold
0.015 tonnes of palladium4
This represents a return of roughly 90% of the initial inputs, which sounds great on paper, but these materials make up a tiny proportion of a phone’s physical weight, as they are primarily used as conductive materials like solders, plating, and wiring5. They account for ~5–10% of the phone’s physical weight.6
The rest of the phone is made up of chips, screens, and batteries, and each of these parts presents a new problem.
The manufacture of chips “bakes in” the resource use; these tiny components are part of energy-intensive and complex manufacturing processes that involve hundreds of steps. You can recycle them for metals, but not for function7; once a chip is broken down, it will never be a chip again.8
Similarly, the screens are made of glass and plastics derived from crude oil; they are constructed in such a way that, once they are destroyed, they cannot be reused. They are made from several inseparable and highly breakable layers that cannot be separated.
Finally, it’s estimated that recycling magnets and lithium batteries yields a tiny return on materials, and as batteries degrade and the chemical composition changes, they become less effective over time.
That’s not to mention the horrific conditions endured by those mining cobalt for batteries in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which have been well documented. Reports from organisations like Amnesty International have documented cases of child labour and dangerous working conditions, with miners facing frequent tunnel collapses, toxic exposure, and highly exploitative wages. Practices like this should have been outlawed decades ago, but for a market as big as smartphones, capitalism not only endures it, it fundamentally relies on it.
Most of a phone’s resource use comes from the initial production; it’s estimated that 70–85% of a phone’s carbon footprint comes from its initial manufacture.9
Stagnating Technology
Google has a deep imperative to keep making phones every single year. Pixel 10 came out in August 2025; Pixel 11 is due to be released in August 2026.
When your business model revolves around making a new product every year, you have to find a way to keep selling them.
This seems at odds with what they claim to be a core value of theirs:
“Our devices are designed to stand the test of time, so that people can enjoy them for longer.”10
A study in 2025 looked at how the changes introduced in annual smartphone releases are perceived by expert reviewers, and whether they truly represent meaningful improvements.
It states that “Between 2007 and 2016, rapid advances in touchscreens, app ecosystems, biometric authentication, mobile payments, and organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays significantly reshaped digital life”, and through the study concluded that “in the flagship smartphone industry, annual product cycles have shifted innovation from technological breakthroughs to marketing-led perception strategies”, and that “many annual ‘innovations’ are perceived less as genuine advancements and more as strategies to sustain the appearance of novelty”.11
This is where AI comes in. When you see adverts for Pixel phones, pay attention to what their marketing team consider to be features: it’s making sure you get the prettiest version of a picture, it’s making sure you can take pictures of the stars, and it’s making sure Gemini can tell you not to put paprika on your granola.
This is an increasing divergence between the use-value and the exchange value of a Pixel phone. As we see the use-value decrease, as the technology isn’t iterated in a meaningful way, Google’s marketing department ensures the exchange value continues in line with market trends.
Look at this advert to see what I’m talking about.
The particular irony of that advert is that Google is pitching the new Pixel 10 as a phone that bucks the trend, by having it do something as mundane as pick out some flowers for someone.
The Battle for Market Share
In my lifetime, I have gone from cassette tape player to portable CD player to MiniDisc (RIP sweet MiniDisc) to MP3 player to smartphone.
Each advance in technology drove demand because it was actively better than what came before. Each change was an improvement.
Today, the technology doesn’t drive demand, production, or output. As we’ve seen, the “improvements” are acts of marketing, and it’s not even being driven by the profit motive - the growth imperative and the importance of market share are what’s driving it.
Take Samsung and Apple, for example, which between them control 52% of the market, with 32% and 20% respectively12; however, it’s estimated that Apple receives around 75% of the profits13. Since market share doesn’t correlate with profit share, profits can’t be the primary driving force.
Google creates products every year because it needs to keep growing, and its goal is to eat into that market share, not because consumers benefit or the technology has improved. It is the definition of waste.
If the technology is built to last, then products should only be iterated when technology becomes available to make a significant enough improvement, or released at arbitrary fixed gates, such as every 5 or 10 years.
If you’re truly committed to sustainability, you don’t make things people don’t need and then spend heavily to convince them to buy them.
Google is committed to driving market share for phones in order to compete, to keep growing, and to keep shareholders happy.
The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall
Karl Marx posited that, as capitalism develops, the rate of profit has a tendency to fall14 - this helps us to understand Google’s situation here.
Google doesn’t make its own phones; Foxconn does, a Chinese company. It also makes Apple’s iPhones - this is an important point that we’ll return to shortly.
Foxconn has invested heavily in automation, machinery, and raw materials - these are not variables that it can influence effectively in the same way it can with labour. This is called constant capital.
If Google were your classic Victorian factory and it had a bunch of workers on a production line to make a phone, and it bought a bunch of raw materials and pumped them through, the main variable it has for capital is wages, so it can pay its workers less. As a result, its profit is variable, and it can control labour. This is called variable capital.15
As technology in automation improves, this improves for everyone, so the constant capital becomes the same for every company - remember, Foxconn makes Apple’s phones too, so it has the same constant capital that Google does. Improvements in production are equalised in the market by competition.
As a result, companies need to keep producing more and more phones to stay competitive. Market share becomes crucial to selling phones because, ultimately, all these phones pretty much do the same thing; the actual technology isn’t really a factor in consumer choice.
Finally, the other way to compete is through clever financing - similar to the way we finance cars through PCPs and HPs, which I plan to write about in the future - Google has created an incentive in the way you finance your phone.
We’d already done this to some extent with the creation of phone contracts, bundling the device and the plan together for the carrier to sell on. This gives tech companies like Google a guaranteed mass block of sales, as the mobile network operator buys the device wholesale from the phone company.
However, the trade-in mechanism effectively causes the cost of upgrading to fall. It captures the second-hand market value itself, and it shifts sales away from carriers. It is incentivising direct purchasing, allowing it to offset the standardisation of constant capital across the market. It can’t compete on production, so it competes on realisation.
The Sustainability Myth
In a world with dwindling natural resources, a climate crisis that isn’t coming (it’s here), poverty increasing globally, and terrible conditions for the miners who extract the very resources Google claims to take seriously with its stance on “sustainability”, it is creating a sea of waste and actively incentivising the consumer to buy into it through marketing and financial incentives, rather than actually delivering a better product.
Under capitalism, we cannot be sustainable. If Google were to release a new phone every 5 or 10 years, it simply wouldn’t be able to operate in the smartphone market - no one would.
There is no business model where this ends up profitable, particularly in the long term, as Foxconn automates its processes even further.
I’m not going to feed into the individualist myth and leave you with a sense of guilt and responsibility, or tell you to run your phone into the ground; it’s not on us to ensure Google is sustainable.
What I will try to leave you with is an understanding of how companies are having to increasingly rely on subtle marketing and sales tactics in order to keep up this façade.
Tech companies want to believe in the idea of endless growth and endless innovation, and we’re reaching the limits of what we are innovating. The old proverb goes, “necessity is the mother of invention”; I believe that stopped being true for most industries quite some time ago, but shareholders are obligated to pretend like it still is.
1 https://store.google.com/gb/magazine/sustainability?hl=en-GB
2 https://store.google.com/magazine/recycling?hl=en-GB
3 https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/04/charted-there-are-more-phones-than-people-in-the-world/
4 https://www.epa.gov/recycle/secret-life-smart-phone
5 https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPhone_13_PER_Sept2021.pdf
6 https://help.copper.fyi/hc/en-us/articles/6785041512604-How-much-and-how-many-metals-in-a-mobile-phone?
7 Ruberti, M. (2024) Environmental performance and trends of the world’s semiconductor foundry industry. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 28, pp. 1183–1197. Available at: Read article. Here we see that Semiconductor growth currently increases waste faster than efficiency improves it.
8 Benjamin, M. (2025) Semiconductor recycling and waste reduction using nanotechnology. Unpublished manuscript, 2 February. This paper discusses the use of nano-technology to improve the efficiency of semiconductor recycling showing the industry focuses on recovering as much value as possible, rather than recovering the original use of the chip.
9 Gupta, U., Kim, Y.G., Lee, S., Tse, J., Lee, H.-H.S., Wei, G.-Y., Brooks, D. and Wu, C.-J. (2020) Chasing Carbon: The Elusive Environmental Footprint of Computing. Harvard University.; Arizona State University.
10 https://store.google.com/gb/magazine/sustainability?hl=en-GB
11 Wickramatunga, C., Nagahawatta, R., Gamachchi, A. and Kaluarachchi, C. (n.d.) Marginal gains or meaningful progress? Exploring Tech Tuber narratives on annual smartphone innovation. Full research paper, Deakin University and Sydney International School of Technology and Commerce
12 https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile - This data isn’t hugely reliable and different sources fluctuate on specifics. This is a close proximation.
13 https://www.statista.com/chart/29925/apples-share-of-the-global-smartphone-market/?srsltid=AfmBOooZiLPGNlYA_8dW8T9_i7RPUZX8muXS7-jNmtU9fSoVCuStrucH - Similar to the above, this data isn’t hugely reliable and different sources fluctuate on specifics. This is a close proximation.
14 Marx, K. (1894) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole.
15 As defined in Marx, K. (1867) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I. Parts II–III: ‘The Transformation of Money into Capital’ and ‘The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value’. Marx distinguishes constant capital (means of production transferring value) from variable capital (labour power creating new value and surplus).
I think the section on the “sustainability myth” gets right to the heart of the contradiction within modern consumer capitalism.
It’s not that smartphones are bad technology. They’re extraordinary pieces of engineering. But many people no longer need to replace them anything like as often as the market requires. A good phone from four or five years ago is still perfectly functional for most users.
That creates a problem for an economic system built around continual growth, market expansion, and shareholder expectations. If products become too durable, too repairable, or simply “good enough”, consumption slows down.
So increasingly the system has to manufacture churn instead. Trade-in incentives, finance models, software pressure, annual release cycles, and marketing-driven novelty all help keep products moving even when the underlying technological leaps are becoming smaller.
I see a similar tension from inside the world of handmade bicycle framebuilding. Traditional steel frames were not marginalised because they stopped working. In many ways they still solve human problems remarkably well. They are durable, repairable, adaptable, relatively low energy to produce, and capable of lasting decades.
The issue is that products designed around longevity, maintenance, and continuity sit awkwardly within economies organised around replacement and throughput.
I’m not suggesting that all modern production should be replaced by small-scale craft. Clearly it can’t. But I do think craft traditions still point towards a different economic logic, one where at least some durable goods are made to last, repaired locally, and embedded within longer relationships between people, materials, and place.
I think what's so frustrating about Google's schemes outlined here is that they convince users that they're making an ethically sound choice, when the primary benefit is to the company and its shareholders. As usual, too, the onus is on the consumer to recycle and use responsibly, but the true driver is constant, wasteful production.