Well it doesn't really .. that's what it cost Scotty doing it the way he did. He was making a video to highlight that phones live on after you throw them away. He probably wasn't trying to make a profit, he was trying to make an interesting movie.
If you visit the markets where he's buying you'll find a virtual disassembly line breaking down phones into component parts (to logic boards if they still work, and chips if they don't) followed by an assembly line of people making 'new' phones from those parts. The thing is that there are people in the "dodgy cell phone market" (people call it that) who are making a good living (by local norms) building iPhones, sometimes from scratch with recycled parts
If you visit the markets where he's buying you'll find a virtual disassembly line breaking down phones into component parts (to logic boards if they still work, and chips if they don't) followed by an assembly line of people making 'new' phones from those parts. The thing is that there are people in the "dodgy cell phone market" (people call it that) who are making a good living (by local norms) building iPhones, sometimes from scratch with recycled parts