6 Shocking Ways Your Phone Is Destroying The Planet

In the Congo, the mining of cobalt -- a vital ingredient in every battery ever -- is a massive part of the economy, employing 100,000 people to mine up to 25 percent of the world's supply. However, cobalt miners work for little to no pay in "artisanal mines," a fancy Starbucks term for a type of mine that has no safety features and is dug purely by hand. (You'll notice that there were no upsides in that sentence.) Oh, and a significant portion of the miners are children. We probably should have mentioned that earlier. One study by UNICEF estimated that 40,000 children are employed in cobalt mining, by sheer virtue of the fact that kids are a) tiny and b) hilariously expendable in an industry that already doesn't value human life.

In Chile, meanwhile, lithium mining has resulted in the exploitation of indigenous groups. Very similar to how our nation was bought from Native Americans for some beads and a lot of violence, techbros and mining companies are sweeping up ancestral lands belonging to the Atacamas. In exchange for extracting billions of dollars in "white gold," these companies gave the Atacamas a handful of schools, sewage systems, and other public amenities ... only to cheat them out of so much money that they can't afford to maintain all of their new infrastructure. But the good news is that this doesn't really matter, as all the mining screws with the local water supply so much that it might make the land barren and eventually uninhabitable in the very near future anyway.

But hey, check out the battery life on our phone! 16 hours and only at 54 percent! Totes worth it.

Unlike creating software in your mom's garage, the process for making physical computer chips is still industrial. A whole litany of solvents and degreasers are involved -- chemicals like trichloroethylene, which are super-dangerous to human health and shouldn't under any circumstances make their way into groundwater. Which is of course exactly what happened. By failing to fix leaky tanks and other vital chemical infrastructures, companies like Intel allowed thousands of gallons of these chemicals to seep into the groundwater of the area -- something which was discovered in the 1980s and led to the EPA (back in the days when we had one) blanketing the area in warning signs and red tape.

But that's all in the past, right? It's not like dozens of tech millionaires and billionaires are now walking around on toxic soil, right? Nope, the chemicals are still in the groundwater, and unfortunately for the companies that have made Silicon Valley their home, they have an awful habit of returning to totally disrupt people's immune systems. This is achieved via a process known as "vapor intrusion," wherein the chemicals circulate through the ventilation systems of buildings. But you try convincing a bunch of Silicon Valley coders that vaping is bad for you.

You know that cutesy statue garden that Google built to celebrate having made a phone, because that's what we do nowadays? That used to be the site of a chip manufacturer called CTS Printex, Inc. Quite curiously, a thousand Google employees working next door were found to have been dosed with "excessive levels" of trichloroethene over the course of two months as a result of a problem with the building's ventilation system.

But hey, at least "everyone's getting brain-damaged" is a good excuse for why so many bad ideas are coming out of Silicon Valley. Time to wheel in some healthy nerds.

Like everything else bad in this world, Baotou's artificial poison lake is a direct result of your smartphone. Almost every rare earth mineral necessary for us to have everything mildly technological, from magnets to touchscreens, comes from Baotou. Its Bayan Obo mines contain 70 percent of the world's reserves, which is one of the main reasons China can buy us a hundred times over.

Mining these minerals, however, is a pain in the ass that creates nightmarish vistas. Even after you've thrown enough people at the mine to retrieve the minerals, there's still the small matter of processing them into a salable state. That's where the chemicals come in. Cerium, for instance, can only be extracted by being crushed and dissolved in sulfuric and nitric acid. To then get rid of the runoff, China dammed off a river and flooded farmland to create a "tailings pond" -- a body of water primarily used to dump toxic sludge in. Imagine the devil's septic tank, and you're halfway there.

Over the years, the lake became more toxins than water. Drinking its water, or just living and breathing its sticky air, have contributed to a ton of illnesses in the region, including nausea, migraines, and arthritis. One study of the lake's mud even found traces of radioactive material, which certainly goes a long way toward explaining the area's suspiciously high number of people with leukemia. Oh, that dam that's at least keeping this hellish landscape contained to the damned of Baotou? It was so shoddily built that even the slightest tremor could bring it toppling down and trigger the ecological end of days. But maybe there's a silver lining. Maybe the mutations will give us all cool tails.

Surely, because we overpay hundreds of dollars per iPhone each year, that left the company with plenty of profits to pay workers compensation, right? Unfortunately, they prefer to spend their winnings "convincing" health officials that there is no link between the many sick workers and the factory conditions. Fangtai Huawei Electronic Technology will, however, buy a bus ticket for anyone too sick to work so they can fuck off back home to their village. They're nice like that.

It's a market problem that was thrown into smart relief most recently when Samsung accidentally built and then recalled 4.3 million potential smart bombs. Unable to be repaired, refurbished, or resold to consumers who don't want to browse Twitter dressed like they're in The Hurt Locker, they needed to find a way of disposing of them that isn't setting them on fire, i.e. something environmentally conscious. Too bad we haven't figured that one out yet.

There are 50 rare elements in each phone, from indium (for the touchscreen) to neodymium (for the speakers) to cobalt (for batteries). Of those 50, it's only currently possible to recycle roughly a dozen of them. That's not just a kick in the pants for Samsung's profit margin, but also a slap in the face for all the people who had to suffer so that those phones could get made. Sure, they were only ever destined to be used for dumb games or sexting, but it's better than a landfill, y'know?

And it's not like we can make some new smartphone materials if we run out of these. Most of these elements aren't replaceable. Once they're gone, they're gone for good. Even worse, when Yale University looked for viable replacements for the metals and elements that go into smartphones, it discovered that there were no viable replacements that could be switched in once we run out. We have "Meh" replacements and "Are you kidding me?" replacements, but nothing that performs as well as the materials that we're currently using. It's a burgeoning crisis that'll force us into reconsidering how we consume electronics -- or even, at the grander level, the self-destructive nature of consumerism. A discussion that we're positive will happen any day now.

Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook. He also has a newsletter about depressing history, if you're into that sort of thing.

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