Abstract
Product reuse advances circular economy by reducing material demand. However, environmental assessments often assume reused products fully replace new ones, or they overlook market changes and shortened lifespans driven by resale and repurchase opportunities. This study presents an empirically based analysis of the second-hand smartphone market and its cumulative effects on manufacturing demand and carbon emissions. Integrating consumer survey data and product lifetime estimates in a stock-and-flow model, we find that in the United States, each second-hand transaction currently extends smartphone use time by 40%, displaces 0.40 new devices, and that circular consumption results in a 34% lower annual carbon footprint. With 25% of consumers purchasing used phones, production demand and carbon emissions are lowered by 15% and 14%, respectively. Yet, shortened use times offset nearly half the potential gains. If reuse became the norm, manufacturing demand could decline by one-third, revealing both the promise and the limits of reuse.
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Data availability
All data supporting the findings and figures of this study are provided in the Supplementary Tables 1-6, which include a full description of the calculations performed and the results obtained. The raw data collected from our smartphone reuse online consumer survey is openly available at the Mendeley Data repository (https://doi.org/10.17632/r3929wws92.1)32.
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Acknowledgements
This work was part of doctoral research funded by the projects supported by EIT Raw Materials, Horizon Europe (CE-RISE project), KR Foundation (Denmark), and a fellowship of the Canon Foundation in Europe. Funding for this work was also provided by the European Commission via the Horizon Europe Research and Innovation program under the FutuRaM project (Grant No 101058522).
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L.A. conceived the study, designed the research, conducted the analyses, and led the writing of the manuscript. C.C. contributed to data collection, validation, and assisted in the analysis for the carbon footprint. B.S. provided advice on the research design and contributed to manuscript editing. A.T. provided guidance on research framing, policy relevance, rebound effects taxonomy and contributed to manuscript revisions. J.M.M. co-supervised the study, supported the interpretation of results, and contributed to writing and revising the manuscript.
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Communications Earth and Environment thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Nandita Basu. [A peer review file is available].
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Amatuni, L., Clemm, C., Sprecher, B. et al. Second-hand smartphones reduce carbon emissions, yet shorter use times limit actual gains. Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03170-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03170-8
