In a smartphone, there are more than 70 different materials, including nearly fifty rare and difficult to exploit metals. Their extraction pollutes the air, water and soil, and this phenomenon is expected to intensify since the demand for these rare materials is expected to double by 2060, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Then, the carbon footprint caused by the manufacturing process of this object is just as disastrous. According to the Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe), our smartphone goes around the planet on average four times before arriving in our pocket.
It is therefore urgent to change the way we consume mobile phones. And consuming better already means consuming less, by resisting the aggressive marketing undertaken by certain brands. In many cases, phones can be repaired and then recycled once they are out of service. Then, the more complex a phone is, the more features it has, the greater its ecological cost. Thus, returning to simpler phones can help reduce the footprint of this object on the planet.
Finally, brands of so-called fair trade telephones have recently flourished, which, if they are not perfect, make it possible to considerably reduce the ecological cost of the device, and to preserve human rights throughout the world.
In this new episode of A Degree of Conscience, Emma Haziza and Salomé Saqué detail the ecological cost of our smarpthones, before highlighting different solutions, both at the political level and at the individual level.
Sources used in this episode:
The ADEME report
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