How is your Phone like a Grizzly Bear? – Parish Magazine Article
Magazine article by Green Christian Vice Chair, Barbara Echlin. Do use as is, or adapt as you wish.
Did you know your phone is equivalent to a grizzly bear?
No I didn’t either!
Each day a theme for prayer and reflection pops into my In Box from Green Christian. On Sundays we send out a prayer. So what, you may be asking has a smart phone to do with the environment or Christianity?
Well, one smartphone contains more than 70 raw materials and more than 50 metals. Many of these need to be mined from the Earth. A standard 200g phone involves extracting resources from more than 200kg of raw materials. That’s equivalent to the weight of 200 standard bags of sugar, 100 bricks or one adult grizzly bear!
I couldn’t name even one single raw material in my smartphone. So I read the linked article by Mark Maslin. Professor of Earth System Science, UCL, and found out that the ten key metals inside smartphones are: cobalt, lithium, tantalum, gallium, graphite, gold, tin, copper, indium and rare earth elements. They are common in the Earth’s crust but usually found in small concentrations.
My next question was why is that a problem? We commonly use materials from the Earth. But:
These critical raw materials are only found in a handful of places. That means control over those materials matters both economically and politically, creating geopolitical tensions, fragile supply chains, and competition for access. This can fuel conflict.
Mining those materials can involve environmental damage, pollution, child labour, human rights violation and dangerous geopolitics.
All these are of concern to us as Christians.
So what needs to be done?
- Phones need to be repairable so that cracked screens, broken electronics and failing batteries can all be replaced easily
- By designing smartphones that are easier to recycle, all their valuable raw materials can be extracted and re-used, rather than typically ending up in landfill in a developing country. Every gram of metal recovered is one less kilogram of rock that has to be dug up
- Smartphones should be built to be upgradable, repairable, re-usable and recyclable
And we can help! Avoid changing our phone when it’s still working. Smartphones should last for at least ten years.
‘The most sustainable smartphone is the one you currently own’, writes Mark Maslin. An estimated 80% of your phone’s negative impact on the environment happens before the first minute of use – before it is even unboxed.
Barbara Echlin
PS On the subject of prayer. Green Christian will be praying on Zoom at 8am for ten minutes each day of the upcoming COP31 United Nations climate conference in Turkey. You are welcome to join us. See the Green Christian website for registration details.
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