Upgrading And Updating
When was the last time you traded in your old cell phone for a brand new one? It probably wasn’t too long ago. As tech companies bring out new and exciting software and phones every single year, it’s easy to get sucked into buying a brand new one. While this doesn’t seem like too much of an issue from the outset – after all, you can spend your own money on what you want – you might not have thought about the specifics that go into making these phones. To create the outer shell, the battery, and the innards of any cell phone, manufacturers have to make use of elements such as phosphorus, gallium, copper, gold, silver, boron, and arsenic. The problem? We are now running out of many of these elements.
Throwing It Away
In fact, smartphones are comprised of 30 different elements. This is pretty impressive, but what’s not impressive is the rate that we are going through these phones. It’s been noted that a whopping 10 million phones are replaced every single month in the European Union, and that’s a lot of elements going to waste. The worst thing about this is that they are chucked in the trash, they are discarded in a drawer, and they are rarely recycled. Because of this constant need for the 30 elements that make up these phones, 17 of them are now on the road to going extinct in the next 100 years or so. This is a huge cause for concern.
Of course, much of the fault lies in the hands of cell phone companies, as they are the ones who tempt us with new and improved phones. However, if you can stop updating your phone or upgrading to a new handset as often, this can help.