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E-waste is a pretty serious problem, and researchers have been studying how to reduce, reuse and recycle old tech as long as there has been old tech to recycle. Google Research and UC San Diego came up with a pretty cool way to deal with at least some of it.
Researchers used 2,000 discarded Google Pixel phones to create a mini computing platform. Unlike the famous Taiwanese grandfather who played Pokemon Go on 64 phones, the old Pixels underwent extensive modifications before being placed in their new home. The motherboards were removed and placed in self-governing clusters comprising 25 to 50 devices, according to the study.
The motherboards had their Android operating systems removed and replaced with Linux, which removed many consumer-facing protections, such as a low-memory killer function that helps phones run more smoothly, but would be counterintuitive in a server context. Everything that was unnecessary, like displays, camera arrays and batteries, was removed, leaving just the motherboards to do their thing.
The Pixel phone server (the blue bars) did surprisingly well on benchmarks compared with an Asus server rack.
This setup was pretty successful. According to Google, the Pixels performed better or at least on par most of the time with professional server racks like the Asus RS720A, a popular choice for enterprise data centers. This made them viable for UC San Diego’s needs, which included a small-scale cloud computing platform that could run applications for classes.
UC San Diego says that 20 Pixels were enough to support a class with over 75 students, and with 2,000 Pixels, they could support 100 classes at once.
The big win for UC San Diego was cost. The price of the Pixel phones and the time it took to set them up was “a fraction of the usual cost” of a comparable amount of server computing power. UC San Diego intends to study how long consumer-grade electronics can last in a more intense server environment and plans to launch the system in the fall 2026 semester.
A small solution to a big problem
While it was small-scale, this experiment has legs when it comes to further use in academia. Google says that the vast majority of school usage, including teaching, grading and even research, is “within the capabilities of a single smartphone to host.” Should UC San Diego’s experiment prove successful, colleges all over the world could use old, discarded smartphones in similar server setups to help reduce costs.
However, this approach isn’t the next big thing in data center or server construction. Data centers can process hundreds of gigabytes per second on the low end. Data centers for AI and other enterprise applications require much larger, stronger and more robust solutions, which bring with them an entirely different set of environmental concerns, like the ridiculous amount of water they need to stay cool and the fact that some data centers use enough electricity to power tens of thousands of homes.
There is no chance that a gaggle of old smartphone motherboards is going to make an impact on the greater data center industry, but it is nice to see that it does work on smaller scales, where businesses and researchers alike often overpay for cloud computing power when they really don’t need that much.
A drop in the bucket for e-waste
It’s commendable that researchers and companies are seeking ways to use e-waste, but they still have a long way to go. The 2,000-smartphone server farm built by UCSD removed a tiny fraction of the estimated 62 million tons of e-waste entering the garbage stream every year, only 22.3% of which is properly recycled. CNET readers do better than average, recycling old tech 39% of the time, but that’s still a concern.
An estimated 5.3 billion mobile phones are thrown away every year. That means UCSD would need to make another 2.65 million such server farms per year in perpetuity to clean it all up. There’s no expectation for one university to do so, but it shows just how big the e-waste problem really is. Those numbers also don’t take into account the large number of adults who keep old tech sitting in a closet, collecting dust.
Other initiatives are helping with this. Right-to-repair laws in the US are slowly making it easier and more affordable to repair tech instead of just throwing it away. Governments and companies are working to raise awareness of proper e-waste recycling so that those metals and chemicals can be reused rather than left to rot in a dump somewhere.
Should UC San Diego’s experiment prove successful, it may be another in a long line of small initiatives to help clean up a problem that was considered out of control many years ago.
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