>Well, a pollutant has no use. That’s the difference. Every piece of technology that carried your commentary from your fingertips to my eyeballs has a nonzero

>Well, a pollutant has no use. That’s the difference. Every piece of technology that carried your commentary from your fingertips to my eyeballs has a nonzero environmental impact. Some watershed in Asia had to be fractionally (after all, the mine likely supplied material for far more devices than yours and mine) poisoned so you could say that. Is that sufficient purpose? Keep in mind modern society exists at the end of a very, very, very long and interconnected supply chain so the raw material from the mine probably (fractionally, of course) finds its way into smoke alarms and pacemakers. Trying to define "purpose" is an unbelievably complex can of worms.