2 ms·
Doesn't it require like half a ton of material to produce one modern phone? (Including all the mining and manufacturing to get one from the earth to ones hand.)
by paulryanrogers 4y ago
Doesn't it require like half a ton of material to produce one modern phone? (Including all the mining and manufacturing to get one from the earth to ones hand.)
If so then 2.5 billion tons is worth some attention, in addition to other ecological challenges.
- crazygringo 4y agoI can't find any data on anything like that. But quick googling reveals an iPhone contains 0.034 g of gold. Another stat says one ounce of gold requires 100,000 oz of ore, so the 0.034 g of gold would require 3.4 kg of ore. Nowhere even remotely close to half a ton. I can't find similar stats for e.g. palladium ore used to extract palladium, but remember that the amounts of precious metals in phones are truly tiny. The news reports I'm finding about "cell phones" and "tons" refer to water -- one report says 13 tons of water per phone. While a pair of leather boots is 25 tons of water, for comparison. But water is recyclable, and it doesn't seem like a concern particularly specific to electronics.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago"Tons of water" is also a pretty pointless metric used only because it sounds bad if you don't engage a crucial thought process. Tons of what kind of water (raw river water for cooling, or drinking water), and where (River, sea, lakes, aquifer, renewing source or not) and what happens to it (returned to the source, contaminated, evaporated, etc). Some places have so much water that they just let it run into the sea. Almost no water is "lost", except when growing food, when a small percentage of the water used is shipped away within the food.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]