plankton

There are a lot of good ideas in this article but the Japanese shaken example does not hold water for iPhones in Japan because the vast majority (99.9%) sold before the 6s are locked to the Japanese carriers who refuse (in my view illegally) to unlock even-off contract iPhones. As a result, desk and office drawers in Japan are filled with old iPhones doing nothing.

Looking around our house, I can count two 4s, and three 5 units all of which are off-contract and none of which can use a SIM from another carrier or MVNO. This is just plain stupidity that Apple could solve in a blink by simply white listing all old off-contract models in the company's unlock database. Doing so would cost Apple and the carriers nothing, but would give this massive unused iPhone resource value in other application fields.

Come on Apple, you're always claiming credit for your environmental steps, so here's one way to allow re-tasking of old iPhones that gives them a second life and prevents them becoming landfill.

US only.  Apple still treats rest of world as second-class citizens in this and other regards.

And still no Tokyo—one of the world's largest cities with the most extensive public transit and the data is pretty much all open sourced too.
What is Apple Japan doing with its time, other than overcharging for the iPhone SE?
There's an Olympics coming in 4 years guys; pull your finger out and get coding.

Pity this scheme is US only—we could do with it in Japan where the carriers have long had a stranglehold on locked phones, although the government has just recently forced them to grudgingly unlock after 6 months into a 2-year contract.
Unlocked phones can be got for a high up-front price from Apple Store Japan online but most Japanese consumers have been so conditioned to accept locked phones on 2-year contracts that almost nobody takes the other option, and so the market stays locked and undisrupted.  You can't even buy a prepaid (non-contract) voice + data SIM here due to an archaic 2006/7 law. 
Apple should start this scheme in Japan and partner with a MVNO to supply SIMs.  Also, it should pressure the Japanese government to repeal the stupid law.