zlacker

Your premise is wrong.

Old phones that have economic life get cleaned up and re-sold. The fact that manufacturers tweak phones annually does not change this.

>>Author+(OP)
Based on the numbers I found from a few minutes of searching you are incorrect. Some phones get resold or reused, most do not. Only 25% of people are using a secondhand phone and the phone population is increasing at 5x the human rate.