Topher White: What can save the rainforest? Your used cell phone

211,907 views ・ 2015-03-03

TED


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00:12
(Rainforest noises)
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In the summer of 2011, as a tourist,
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I visited the rainforests of Borneo for the very first time,
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and as you might imagine,
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it was the overwhelming sounds of the forest that struck me the most.
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There's this constant cacophony of noise.
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Some things actually do stick out.
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For example, this here is a big bird, a rhinoceros hornbill.
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This buzzing is a cicada.
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This is a family of gibbons.
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It's actually singing to each other over a great distance.
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The place where this was recorded was in fact a gibbon reserve,
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which is why you can hear so many of them,
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but in fact the most important noise that was coming out of the forest that time
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was one that I didn't notice,
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and in fact nobody there had actually noticed it.
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So, as I said, this was a gibbon reserve.
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They spend most of their time rehabilitating gibbons,
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but they also have to spend a lot of their time
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protecting their area from illegal logging that takes place on the side.
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And so if we take the sound of the forest
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and we actually turn down the gibbons, the insects, and the rest,
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in the background, the entire time, in recordings you heard,
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was the sound of a chainsaw at great distance.
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They had three full-time guards who were posted around this sanctuary
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whose job was in fact to guard against illegal logging,
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and one day, we went walking, again as tourists, out into the forest,
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and within five minutes' walk,
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we stumbled upon somebody who was just sawing a tree down,
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five minutes' walk, a few hundred meters from the ranger station.
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They hadn't been able to hear the chainsaws,
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because as you heard, the forest is very, very loud.
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It struck me as quite unacceptable that in this modern time,
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just a few hundred meters away from a ranger station in a sanctuary,
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that in fact nobody could hear it when someone who has a chainsaw gets fired up.
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It sounds impossible, but in fact, it was quite true.
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So how do we stop illegal logging?
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It's really tempting, as an engineer, always to come up with a high-tech,
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super-crazy high-tech solution,
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but in fact, you're in the rainforest.
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It has to be simple, it has to be scalable,
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and so what we also noticed while were there was that
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everything we needed was already there.
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We could build a system that would allow us to stop this
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using what's already there.
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Who was there? What was already in the forest?
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Well, we had people.
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We had this group there that was dedicated, three full-time guards,
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that was dedicated to go and stop it,
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but they just needed to know what was happening out in the forest.
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The real surprise, this is the big one,
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was that there was connectivity out in the forest.
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There was cell phone service way out in the middle of nowhere.
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We're talking hundreds of kilometers from the nearest road,
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there's certainly no electricity, but they had very good cell phone service,
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these people in the towns were on Facebook all the time,
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they're surfing the web on their phones,
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and this sort of got me thinking that in fact it would be possible
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to use the sounds of the forest,
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pick up the sounds of chainsaws programmatically,
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because people can't hear them,
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and send an alert.
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But you have to have a device to go up in the trees.
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So if we can use some device to listen to the sounds of the forest,
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connect to the cell phone network that's there,
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and send an alert to people on the ground,
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perhaps we could have a solution to this issue for them.
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But let's take a moment to talk about saving the rainforest,
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because it's something that we've definitely all heard about forever.
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People in my generation have heard about saving the rainforest
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since we were kids,
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and it seems that the message has never changed:
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We've got to save the rainforest, it's super urgent,
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this many football fields have been destroyed yesterday.
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and yet here we are today, about half of the rainforest remains,
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and we have potentially more urgent problems like climate change.
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But in fact, this is the little-known fact that I didn't realize at the time:
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Deforestation accounts for more greenhouse gas
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than all of the world's planes, trains, cars, trucks and ships combined.
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It's the second highest contributor to climate change.
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Also, according to Interpol,
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as much as 90 percent of the logging that takes place in the rainforest
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is illegal logging, like the illegal logging that we saw.
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So if we can help people in the forest enforce the rules that are there,
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then in fact we could eat heavily into this 17 percent
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and potentially have a major impact in the short term.
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It might just be the cheapest, fastest way to fight climate change.
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And so here's the system that we imagine.
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It looks super high tech.
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The moment a sound of a chainsaw is heard in the forest,
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the device picks up the sound of the chainsaw,
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it sends an alert through the standard GSM network that's already there
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to a ranger in the field
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who can in fact show up in real time and stop the logging.
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It's no more about going out and finding a tree that's been cut.
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It's not about seeing a tree from a satellite
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in an area that's been clear cut,
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it's about real-time intervention.
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So I said it was the cheapest and fastest way to do it,
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but in fact, actually, as you saw, they weren't able to do it,
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so it may not be so cheap and fast.
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But if the devices in the trees were actually cell phones,
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it could be pretty cheap.
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Cell phones are thrown away by the hundreds of millions every year,
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hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone,
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not counting the rest of the world, which of course we should do,
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but in fact, cell phones are great.
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They're full of sensors.
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They can listen to the sounds of the forest.
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We do have to protect them.
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We have to put them in this box that you see here,
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and we do have to power them.
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Powering them is one of the greater engineering challenges
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that we had to deal with,
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because powering a cell phone under a tree canopy,
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any sort of solar power under a tree canopy,
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was an as-yet-unsolved problem,
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and that's this unique solar panel design that you see here,
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which in fact is built also from recycled byproducts of an industrial process.
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These are strips that are cut down.
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So this is me putting it all together
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in my parents' garage, actually.
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Thanks very much to them for allowing me to do that.
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As you can see, this is a device up in a tree.
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What you can see from here, perhaps, is that they are pretty well obscured
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up in the tree canopy at a distance.
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That's important, because although they are able to hear chainsaw noises
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up to a kilometer in the distance,
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allowing them to cover about three square kilometers,
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if someone were to take them, it would make the area unprotected.
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So does it actually work?
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Well, to test it, we took it back to Indonesia,
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not the same place, but another place,
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to another gibbon reserve
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that was threatened daily by illegal logging.
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On the very second day, it picked up illegal chainsaw noises.
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We were able to get a real-time alert.
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I got an email on my phone.
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Actually, we had just climbed the tree. Everyone had just gotten back down.
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All these guys are smoking cigarettes,
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and then I get an email, and they all quiet down,
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and in fact you can hear the chainsaw
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really, really faint in the background,
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but no one had noticed it until that moment.
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And so then we took off to actually stop these loggers.
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I was pretty nervous.
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This is the moment where we've actually arrived close to where the loggers are.
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This is the moment where you can see where I'm actually regretting
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perhaps the entire endeavor.
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I'm not really sure what's on the other side of this hill.
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That guy's much braver than I am.
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But he went, so I had to go, walking up,
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and in fact, he made it over the hill,
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and interrupted the loggers in the act.
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For them, it was such a surprise --
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they had never, ever been interrupted before --
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that it was such an impressive event for them,
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that we've heard from our partners they have not been back since.
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They were, in fact, great guys.
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They showed us how the entire operation works,
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and what they really convinced us on the spot was that
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if you can show up in real time and stop people,
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it's enough of a deterrent they won't come back.
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So --
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Thank you. (Applause)
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Word of this spread, possibly because we told a lot of people,
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and in fact, then some really amazing stuff started to happen.
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People from around the world started to send us emails, phone calls.
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What we saw was that people throughout Asia,
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people throughout Africa, people throughout South America,
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they told us that they could use it too,
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and what's most important,
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what we'd found that we thought might be exceptional,
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in the forest there was pretty good cell phone service.
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That was not exceptional, we were told,
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and that particularly is on the periphery of the forests that are most under threat.
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And then something really amazing happened,
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which was that people started sending us their own old cell phones.
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So in fact what we have now is a system
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where we can use people on the ground, people who are already there,
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who can both improve and use the existing connectivity,
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and we're using old cell phones that are being sent to us
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by people from around the world
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that want their phones to be doing something else in their afterlife,
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so to speak.
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And if the rest of the device can be completely recycled,
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then we believe it's an entirely upcycled device.
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So again, this didn't come because of any sort of high-tech solution.
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It just came from using what's already there,
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and I'm thoroughly convinced that if it's not phones,
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that there's always going to be enough there
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that you can build similar solutions
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that can be very effective in new contexts.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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