Resources, Conservation and Recycling 73 (2013) 162–171 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Resources, Conservation and Recycling journa l h o me pag e: www.elsevier.com/locate/resconrec A critical analysis of the sustainability of mobile phone use Annarita Paiano a,∗ , Giovanni Lagioia a , Andrea Cataldo b a Department of Business and Law Studies, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Largo Abbazia Santa Scolastica, 53-70124 Bari, Italy b Innovation Engineering Department, University of Salento, Via per Monteroni, 73100 Lecce, Italy a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 13 August 2012 Received in revised form 10 January 2013 Accepted 6 February 2013 Keywords: Mobile phones Usage patterns Energy use Resources consumption End-of-life devices Sustainability a b s t r a c t In the last twenty years, there has been a sharp increase in the consumption of commodities with a short life-cycle. This is especially true for electronic equipment such as mobile phones, which are the focus of this paper. The short lifespan, which is due to continually substituting obsolete equipment with newer and more innovative models, has stimulated the growth in sales of these electronic goods. Europe continues to be the main mobile phone market in developed countries, but this growth has slowed down over the last two years. Despite being an already mature market, Italy has a “diffusion rate” (i.e., the number of active lines per 100 inhabitants) higher than 146, which is the highest in the European Union. This scenario demonstrated the need for a study examining the sustainability of the mobile phone sector according to two critical aspects that are often due to the behavioural patterns of the users: the first is the energy consumption of mobile phones and their associated equipment, and the second is related to the conflicting link between potential dematerialisation due to the miniaturisation of the devices and the resource consumption and waste generated in this sector. This paper discusses these two critical aspects and presents an overview of the Italian mobile phone sector, particularly related to the energy consumption during the use phase and increase of mass flows due to the devices circulating in Italy and the higher amount of the disposable products that have to be managed. The results show that, in Italy, the entire mobile phone system consumes approximately 2200 GWh per year, which is equal to 0.7% of the national electricity consumption, and produces potential e-waste from end-of-life devices totalling over 11 thousand tonnes for the period from 2007 to 2012. Concerning the issue of resources consumption, this estimate highlights that the potential savings in inputs, due to the reduction in device weight over time, has always been counteracted by their increasing demand. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction It is well known that mobile phones have a high turnover rate (Assinform, 2007–2011; ITU, 2009). Their potential life span is approximately ten years, but most users change their phones fre- quently, causing the usable life of these devices to decrease to 12–24 months (Huang et al., 2008). This consumer behaviour is due to technological obsolescence and fashion trends, which are often planned by manufacturers, and has led to exponential mobile phone sales (Lagioia et al., 2006). Additionally, decreasing mobile phone prices, the marketing strategies of mobile network operators and specific tariff options and offers have further stimulated sales. In Italy, for instance, mobile phone operators dominated mobile phone sales the last few years. The Italian market for mobile communications has shown a clear growth trend for approximately the last decade (see Fig. 1) ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 0805049086. E-mail addresses: annarita.paiano@uniba.it (A. Paiano), giovanni.lagioia@uniba.it (G. Lagioia), andrea.cataldo@unisalento.it (A. Cataldo). and, currently, the so-called penetration rate (the number of active lines per 100 inhabitants) is greater than 146, which is the high- est in the European Union (EU) (European Commission, 2010). The prevalence of mobile phones in Italy led to the development of this study, which examines the main critical issues of the mobile phone sector, which are strictly linked to user behaviour. Hence, this paper estimates the impact of the mobile phone sector on the national electricity consumption in a reference year, on the growing consumption of resources and on e-waste production. The second section describes a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the mobile sector worldwide and in the European Union with a focus on Italy. The third section illustrates one of the methodological aspects of the study. Particularly, the available data on the Italian mobile sector were differentiated by transmission standard (GSM, UMTS and HSDPA) 3 per mobile phone to identify three user pro- files and the related usage patterns. The other subsections analyse 3 The acronyms GSM, UMTS, and HSDPA stands for Groupe Special Mobile, Univer- sal Mobile Telecommunications System, and High Speed Downlink Packet Access, respectively. These transmission standards are usually called 2G, 3G and 3.5G tech- nologies, where G stands for Generation. 0921-3449/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2013.02.008