Will renting iPhones help save planet?

In 2015, German entrepreneur Michael Cassau was in need of some gadgets for an apartment he was planning to occupy for a few months. Buying seemed wasteful, considering the cost of new devices and the environmental impact associated with manufacturing new ones.
But renting, an obvious option, simply wasn’t available. So Cassau founded Grover Group, a gadget rental company based in Berlin. Seven years later, it’s renting out 500,000 gadgets, mostly around Europe, and it just raised $330 million for a $1 billion valuation.
It’s rare when what’s good for the pocketbook is also good for the environment. Grover, along with other companies offering rental and subscription services, is hoping to achieve both. For now, the most likely outcome is that consumers will benefit, while the environmental outcomes are marginally better, at best.
But that’s just the short term. Grover and other companies are betting on a long-term shift from ownership to hardware rental and subscriptions. If they’re even remotely correct, the global technology industry will need to shift to accommodate them.
Device rental isn’t a new idea. In the 1980s, business productivity devices like photocopiers and fax machines were typically rented due to their high upfront costs (faxes started around $2,500) and the potential for expensive maintenance. It was only in the 1990s, as the cost of technology declined, that many business consumers opted for purchase.
That cheap technology was good for productivity and the bottom line of manufacturers and their customers. But cheap technology came with a new set of problems. As manufacturing costs declined, so too did the durability of devices. What’s left behind are piles of unwanted gadgets that were designed to be upgraded, not repaired. That, in turn, creates pressure to manufacture more stuff.
According to Apple Inc, 81% of the carbon emissions associated with the full life cycle of the iPhone 13 are generated during the production process.

—Bloomberg