The afterlife of your smartphone – is the planet paying too much for our luxury?

 
Extracting the valuable materials requires the use of toxic acids and working conditions in the mines are notoriously dangerous. China isn't exactly at the forefront of environmental regulations, which makes the negative impact of these processes even worse. One major problem when it comes to rare-earth elements is that some of them are practically irreplaceable. This means that manufacturers can't just go for the alternative if they can't get the material they need, adding an economical and even political value to them.

Precious and not so precious metals

Here are all the well-known metals – Gold, Silver, Aluminum, Copper, Nickel etc. that make up a major part of our smartphones. While these materials are spread more evenly, and companies have more choice in suppliers, because of the large amount that goes into each device (compared to the previous category), the resources spent on them are significant. A ton of ore is usually needed to get a single gram of gold.

Cobalt is a case on its own. The material is used in batteries and almost half of the world's cobalt supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. There have been reports that child labor is used in cobalt mines in the country, adding a negative humanitarian impact on top of the environmental one.

Plastics

Plastic materials are cheap and relatively easy to manufacture, which is why that's the preferred material when phone makers are designing low-end devices. The high diversity of plastics and plastic polymer composites makes it hard to recycle the material efficiently.

What comes out of a smartphone?

Before a smartphone can get recycled, there is another hurdle that must be overcome: collecting the devices. Many places lack the infrastructure necessary to collect e-waste, part of which is used smartphones, and people often don't have any incentive (besides their inner greenness) to treat e-waste differently and make it easy to be recycled.

Once that's done is when the hard work begins. Firstly, most of the e-waste collected in the US (upwards of 65%) is exported to developing countries for recycling. This creates additional emissions released in the atmosphere, further adding to the carbon footprint of each device.

Once the products reach the recycling facility they have to be disassembled. Depending on how advanced the facility is, that can be done by machines or manual labor. 

While manufacturing a smartphone is no easy task, separating valuable materials from components is an engineering achievement in itself. Because different elements are in small quantities are so deeply integrated, extracting them is an extremely difficult process.

A lot of companies opt to extract only the materials they can get easily by melting components. For other materials specialized equipment is needed, and the processes are power-intensive and use toxic chemicals. Even if everything valuable is extracted from a device, there is still a large amount of waste that goes to a landfill.

So, what should be done to improve the situation?

For starters, products should be designed with recyclability in mind.

Where do companies stand when it comes to environmental responsibility?

It's hard to evaluate what companies do to make their products more sustainable, because they don't release enough information, but Greenpeace has this handy graphic that can give you an idea: