Galaxy Note7 continues on its afterlife

Samsung Electronics announced how it is recycling leftover parts and minerals from its discontinued Galaxy Note7 phablet on Tuesday.

According to the company, it will use core parts of the phone such as displays, memory chips and camera modules in other phones or resell them. The smartphone maker also reported it will extract about 157 tons of minerals from the recalled phones including gold, silver, cobalt and copper and reuse them.

The Korean IT giant emphasized the process will be managed using “environmentally friendly methods.”

The smartphone maker recalled about 4.3 million phablets that were prone to overheating, melting or bursting into flames last year.

Since then, it has been pushed by environmental groups such as Greenpeace to say how it is dealing with the parts.

Samsung’s first recycling was to actually release 400,000 upgraded and safer units of the phablet, which it called its Galaxy Note Fan Edition, on the Korean market July 7. But the company used fresh inventory of Note7 phones and parts for the special edition.

Tuesday’s announcement dealt with parts and units Samsung collected back from customers.

It didn’t give exact timelines for the total recycling process, but it will begin this month. Samsung will be collaborating with companies specializing in parts extraction and regeneration of electronics devices at home and abroad.

“We will expand implementation of environmentally friendly methods from production to collecting old devices and processing them,” Samsung said in a statement.

The announcement comes roughly a month ahead of the release of the Note8 phablet, which is expected to be released as early as the end of August.

BY KIM JEE-HEE [kim.jeehee@joongang.co.kr]