Millions of people dispose of their old phones every year, negatively impacting the environment due to their harmful materials such as mercury found in batteries, LCD screens, circuit boards, lead, arsenic, and silica. In this context, phone refurbishment companies like "Back Market" are launching advertising campaigns urging users to send devices they wish to dispose of for recycling.
Experts say that smartphones contain, alongside environmentally harmful waste, a hidden treasure of natural resources such as gold and silver, as well as many rare earth elements. If we dismantle an ordinary iPhone, we will find about 0.034 grams of high-quality gold, worth approximately 2 US dollars, in addition to 0.34 grams of silver, 0.015 grams of palladium, and a very small amount of platinum. The device also contains smaller amounts of aluminum (25 grams) and copper (around 15 grams).
Considering that hundreds of millions of people own smartphones, these small quantities accumulate, as a ton of iPhones can contain a purer amount of gold that exceeds 300 times what a ton of raw gold contains. At the same time, one million mobile phones can yield nearly 16 tons of copper wires, 15 kilograms of palladium used in the devices' electrical circuits, and a collection of rare earth elements that are difficult to mine and refine.
According to experts, the intensive industrial processes involved in mining and refining the raw materials for a single smartphone use an estimated 3,190 gallons of water, enough to fill a commercial tanker. The rare earth elements used in the production of an iPhone include yttrium, lanthanum, terbium, neodymium, gadolinium, and praseodymium. Yttrium and gadolinium are used in the display screen; neodymium and praseodymium in speakers and headphones; and lanthanum makes the small lens in the camera sharper.
Many of these materials can be found in China, which produces about 42% of the annual iPhone production worldwide. The primary source of gadolinium, for example, is from mines in inland China. While most of the lithium used in manufacturing lithium-ion batteries for smartphones is mined in Australia and South America, 97% of it is refined in China. Both China and the United States, along with Kazakhstan, process beryllium used in forming a copper alloy for making battery contacts and electronic connectors for iPhones.
Lanthanum oxide, the substance that helps give iPhone cameras ultra-clear image quality, is primarily extracted in the United States, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia. This reliance on raw materials from around the world helps explain why the latest model of the iPhone has a high price that can exceed 1,200 US dollars, according to the Daily Mail.
