The most sustainable smartphone is the one you currently own. An estimated 80% of your phone’s negative impact on the environment happens before the first minute of use – before it is even unboxed.
One smartphone contains more than 70 raw materials and more than 50 metals. Many of these need to be mined from the Earth. A standard 200g phone involves extracting resources from more than 200kg of raw materials. That’s equivalent to the weight of 200 standard bags of sugar, 100 bricks or one adult grizzly bear.
The mining of raw materials devastates landscapes, disrupts local water supplies and pollutes ecosystems. Entire communities in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ecuador and Philippines have been displaced to make way for mining sites. Some countries ignore the child labour used in their mining and processing operations.
Many of your phone’s critical raw materials are only found in a handful of places. That means control over those materials matters both economically and politically, creating geopolitical tensions, fragile supply chains, and competition for access. This can fuel conflict.
In short, behind the phone in your hand sits a story that involves environmental damage, pollution, human rights violation and dangerous geopolitics.
A recent survey of 6,000 adults in six countries (the UK, US, France, Germany, Spain and Japan) found that more than half could not name a single raw material in their smartphone. The survey, commissioned by Back Market (a global tech refurbishment company), found that only one in four people feel confident they know what goes into their phone. Seven in ten have never thought to investigate the origins of the device they use every day.
Awareness of the consequences of mining can influence consumers’ decisions. Seven in ten people surveyed said child labour would make them less likely to buy a new phone, while nearly two-thirds are interested in seeing how materials are extracted and processed.
Mine My Phone
To tackle this gap in awareness, Back Market collaborated with nine international experts, including me, to help build Mine My Phone. This open-access digital hub maps global extraction sites and connects them to the ten key metals inside smartphones: cobalt, lithium, tantalum, gallium, graphite, gold, tin, copper, indium and rare earth elements.
The rare earth elements are a group of 17 metals that include neodymium, cerium and lanthanum. They are common in the Earth’s crust but usually found in small concentrations – only deposits with 5% weight of the metals are financially viable at the moment.
You can use this map to trace your phone’s materials back to their sources. Content can be filtered by type of impact (such as environmental, human or geopolitical), and there are also expert interviews and investigative reports into the conditions found at mining sites around the world.
The metallic element cobalt is an essential component of almost all mobile phone batteries, for example. Some of the cobalt in your phone could have been mined by children as young as six.
Extracting cobalt relies on two very different methods: industrial open-pit mines, which use heavy machinery to break through the earth and pull up the minerals, and artisanal mines, where workers dig by hand with crude tools, with little protective equipment.
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‘We miners die a lot.’ Appalling conditions and poverty wages: the lives of cobalt miners in the DRC
DRC possesses 50% of the world’s cobalt reserves, and most of what is mined gets shipped to China. There, more than 75% of the global supply of cobalt is refined into pure cobalt, to be used in mobile phones or electric vehicle batteries.
As the richest deposits are used up, production of pure cobalt is expected to start falling after 2030. By 2040, the world’s demand could fall short by around 50,000 tonnes each year.
The future of smartphones
Mine My Phone aims to empower consumers so they can lobby governments all over the world to regulate the technology industry – so that smartphones are built to be upgradable, repairable, re-usable and recyclable.
The smartphone industry needs to change. While some companies are already building new profit models, such as Dutch company Fairphone’s modular designs, the industry’s big players are yet to engage.
Cars last between 12 and 28 years. Smartphones should last for at least ten years.
To avoid unnecessary waste, phones need to be upgradable. In terms of technology, we should be able to put in faster processors or better cameras. When it comes to software, we need guaranteed support for phones for at least ten years.
Phones need to be repairable so that cracked screens, broken electronics and failing batteries can all be replaced easily. More phones could be made to be reusable, just like used cars.
By designing smartphones that are easier to recycle, all their valuable raw materials can be extracted and re-used, rather than typically ending up in landfill in a developing country. Every gram of metal recovered is one less kilogram of rock that has to be dug up.
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