Old phones could have a new chapter as tiny data centres, a new line of research has found.
Each year, more than 1.2 billion smartphones are produced globally. Despite the expense to consumers and the environmental toll of producing them, our devices have an increasingly short lifespan as people tend to replace them every two to three years.
But rather than gathering dust in a drawer – or adding to the world’s mountain of electronic waste – discarded smartphones could be reconfigured for a range of useful green applications.
“Innovation often begins not with something new, but with a new way of thinking about the old, re-imagining its role in shaping the future,” says Huber Flores, Associate Professor of Pervasive Computing at the University of Tartu in Estonia.
He is one of several European researchers behind the new study published in the IEEE Pervasive Computing journal.
How can old smartphones be reused?
Turning outdated smartphones into micro data centres is surprisingly cheap, if you know how.
The researchers found that it only costs around €8 to bypass a phone’s hardware features and reprogramme it.
Firstly, the researchers removed the phones’ batteries and replaced them with external power sources to reduce the risk of chemical leakage into the environment, a ScienceDaily report explains.
Then, four phones were connected together, fitted with 3D-printed casings and holders, and turned into a working prototype ready to be reused.
