Smartphones and their global impact

What effects do the latest generation smartphones have on the environment we live in?

These devices are becoming ever more omnipresent, and most consumers frequently replace them with newer models, generating an incredible waste of resources and energy:  the unstoppable race for the latest smartphones on the market is certainly causing serious repercussions for the entire planet.

The first big problem caused by the obsessive acquisition of these latest generation smartphones, concerns the extraction and processing of the precious metals which are required in their manufacture.  As the chemist Klaus Kummerer teaches, this is the case of neodymium for example: a rare earth metal, demand for which, especially in the last few years,has seen an exponential rise.

Consumers don’t realise, but each single phone contains thousands of chemical products (the gold in the SIM, the copper in the wires, the lithium in the batteries etc.), which are wasted as soon as those devices are no longer fashionable.  Furthermore, their continual disposal uses enormous amounts of manpower.

Considering that today’s waste can become tomorrow’s resources, the only possible solution for the environment seems to be to recycle old mobile phones, in order to give new life to the precious metals they contain.  A positive idea, but for now totally utopian, thanks to the huge numbers of people who, due to laziness or other reasons, are not prepared to give up their devices.

If the academic James Clark considers recycling a real necessity, Kummerer shows his scepticism on this matter, maintaining that such a practice does not resolve the problem definitively.  This is due to the simple fact that the mix of chemical elements present in latest generation smartphones with components such as plastic, makes their complete separation impossible.

In order to improve the situation, a team of dutch entrepreneurs has developed Fairphone.  It’s a latest generation smartphone, which, thanks to the option of replacing all its components, can last forever.  Forever is of course a very long time, but even if, instead of changing our device every two years, we changed it only every five, the environment would certainly be grateful.

The main obstacle today comes from the multinationals, who are more interested in profits than in protecting precious metals: huge international corporations who would need some good reasons for reducing smartphone production.

Translated by Joanne Beckwith