Think about that phone you have. It is your gateway to the world, whether you use it for communication, hold up with your social media, or accessing the supposedly extensive amounts of information on the wide web, they have nearly become the centerpiece of our lives. What we never see is how bad these phones are for the environment. Many harmful materials like lead, zinc, and chromium, are often found in phones and will have substantial effects if nothing is done soon. With these materials, the effect of producing, utilizing, and disposing of them, cell phones have a very considerable effect on our environment that not so many people are aware of.
Let’s start at the very beginning. As it is with almost all the things we have, the raw materials have to be found and tunneled. This creates one of the worst situations in producing cell phones. The three most central metals in our phones by weight are iron at 20%, aluminum at 40%, and finally copper at 70%. With the mining of these metals come huge amounts of “mine tailings”, or the solid and liquid waste that comes from the extraction of these metals. The tailings are hauled off to landfill-Esque areas that could be up to many square kilometers in size. This trash yard is very huge deeps that hold all of the tailings. With this, the deeps run a risk of flooding their contents into close areas. That is exactly what happened on August 4th, 2014. In the Cariboo region of Central British Columbia, one of these toxic deeps breached, and spilled over 6.5 million gallons of polluted materials into the nearby Polley Lake and surrounding waterway. An immediate state of emergency was asserted for the area around the lake, as it was a source of water. The outcomes of this catastrophe are still being felt today, economically and environmentally as the mine that used the lake has since shut down and sent packing many workers and the quality of the water is still under question and maybe a question for decades to come. As terrible as this example was, it was not an unusual incident. There have been over 40 different tailing deep spills in the last decade, and we still don’t know the long term consequences of them.
Next, up in our phones live in us buying them and utilizing them. The first thing we have to do whenever we get a new device is charging it. Seems harmless right? But, not so much, phones need electricity to charge their batteries. You might not think your phone uses that much electricity to charge, but remember that there are almost 4.8 billion cell phone users worldwide. Charging a normal phone takes around 5.5 watt-hours per night, and over a year would be about 2 kilowatt-hours total. Multiplying that by every phone user will be 9.6 billion kWh per year just to charge phones. Using an emissions calculator from the EPA will be 14,966,410,480 pounds of CO2 being released into the air every year. Putting that into perspective, that’s comparable to the emissions of 1,441,327 cars being driven for a year. And that’s just to charge phones!.
At last, your phone caught up with the end of its life. It is time to elevate to the newest model, even though it only like a year since you got your last one. So you do what you think is right, and you recycle it. Big victory for the ecosystem? Possibly not. Only 15% to 20% of electronic waste is recycled, even then, this recycling method isn’t much better than just throwing our electronics in a trash yard. Most of these recycled devices get shipped to countries with weak e-waste laws, so the devices can be cultivated of their precious metals, and the rest being burned or thrown in a trash yard. Even then, with new improvements in different parts of the cell phone, less of these precious metals are being used, and the cost to cultivate them is becoming greater than the resale price of the metals. If we keep pursuing this track we’re on, there will someday be nowhere for these devices to go after people get rid of them. But there are multiple solutions to deal with these issues. The easiest way of discarding our old devices is to resell them. This can be done on sites like eBay or Craigslist, where there will more than likely be a buyer. Another method is to donate them to second-hand stores. Finally, you can find a licensed recycler that withstands by strict regulation that can take care of disposal for you.
After all this, one may complain that we can’t just get new phones! They are already almost old 3 years after you buy them!”I agree with this point, there is something we could do about it. If we can get makers at main technology companies to make more modular devices, we would not have to entirely elevate to new devices every month. Modular devices have parts designed to be convertible, that way we never have to entirely upgrade the whole device. With this, I believe that we can cut down on the overall environmental effects of creating, utilizing, and disposing of our mobile devices.
Mine tailing disasters, outrageous energy usage, and unhealthy recycling schemes are the supposedly “normal” risks we are taking buying these devices every so frequently. At what point will the risk raid the reward? Right now it may not look like a big problem, but we have to keep forthcoming generations in mind too. If we stay on the track we are now, there might just not be a forthcoming generation. Are the few hundred dollars you pay on the modern device the only price you’re paying for that cell phone?
There is no doubt that the mobile phone is a very useful tool and today, mobile phones are a major part of society. . It eases communication with colleagues, friends, But every technology that provides such benefits comes with a consequent price. But this impact of mobile phones on society you started is astronomical.