Don’t let Congress slash exports of used gadgets

The fastest growing niche of the global smartphone business isn’t the latest, greatest upgrade. It’s used phones, and American companies are leaders in supplying them to consumers at home and abroad. It’s a commercial success story with environmental and social benefits. But thanks to a provision hidden in a sprawling legislative trade- and industrial-policy package recently passed by the US House of Representatives, that trade is now in jeopardy.
A brisk global trade in used consumer electronics began shortly after World War II with US exports of radios to emerging markets like Taiwan and Japan. Some of those radios weren’t in good working condition, but up-and-coming countries took them, anyway. Low wages and the high cost of new electronics made it worthwhile to repair and refurbish the ones that US consumers discarded.
For decades, and through new generations of tech, from landline phones to cordless phones, appliances, video games and television, America’s relentless upgrade cycle has turned trash into treasured goods.
Nobody knows how many toasters, telephones, refrigerators, radios and televisions have been exported from US shores over the decades. The trade isn’t tracked in the way that new goods are (via harmonised trade codes, for example).
But hints abound. In West Africa, vendors of used electronics far outnumber those of new gadgets on the city streets of Accra, Ghana, Lagos, Nigeria and Cotonou, Benin, and they always manage to have a steady stream of new inventory. A 2015 study of electricity use in West Africa determined that imported secondhand goods contributed to a significant boost in African energy consumption that couldn’t be explained by new goods sales.
The benefits of this trade are many. According to Apple Inc, 81% of the carbon associated with an iPhone 13 is emitted during its production (only 18% is emitted as a result of use).
The longer that phone can be kept in use, the less carbon will be emitted by the production of new phones. Low-income phone buyers, especially in emerging markets, are a key means of keeping older phones in use.
In rural India, a $15 smartphone is a splurge and that’s a key factor creating demand for imported secondhand handsets — especially older models, such as the iPhone 7, introduced in 2016 — that most Americans would consign to the recycling bin. Just as important, those cheap used phones are a key — and sometimes, only — means of providing digital access to low-income communities.
Nonetheless, environmentalists, journalists and some regulators began in the 1990s to raise concerns about the export of US secondhand electronics to emerging markets. They worried that these devices wouldn’t really be reused, but instead would end up in environmentally destructive recycling facilities.
The Senate Armed Services Committee also raised concerns that US electronics exports were being repurposed into military equipment.
Both of these arguments contain elements of truth. China excepted, emerging market nations lack the ability to recycle waste electronics in a manner consistent with the expectations of US environmentalists and regulators. But most used devices are worth far less as recoverable scrap in these regions than they are as used devices, even devices needing repair.

—Bloomberg