How Green is Your Smartphone?. Richard Maxwell
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prescribed. Please be careful not to store or use your phone next to your body. Rely on wired ear phones, text, or speaker phones when possible. Outsmart your smartphone.
In general, we hope that an abiding legacy of green politics and theory will be the development and installation of the precautionary principle into everyday life and policymaking.7 That principle is opposed to conventional cost–benefit analysis, which looks at the pluses and minuses of consumer satisfaction versus safety. Instead, it places the burden of proof onto proponents of industrial processes to show they are environmentally safe, the idea being to avoid harm rather than deal with risks once they are already in motion: prevention, not cure.
The Greenest Smartphone is the One You Already Own
Retaining the smartphone you already own is your greenest option. First, we point to hazards faced by extractive and factory workers who make these devices for us. Their workplace pressures intensify each time consumers order the latest model smartphone. By keeping smartphones for as long as possible, users can de-pressurize the labor process.
Second, we look at smartphones among an array of digital screen technologies that use sizeable amounts of energy and natural resources, both in their production, through the emission of greenhouse gases and hazardous pollutants, and in their useful lifetimes, because of their need for what is often coal-fired power to recharge and connect to network systems and data services.
If we combine emissions from manufacturing and the electricity that powers network and data-storage facilities, smartphones and other so-called terminal platforms produce about 1.4 percent of the world’s total carbon footprint. Most of that happens during manufacturing; over the useful lifetime of a phone, relatively few greenhouse-gas emissions are produced (Malmodin and Lundén, 2018, pp. 28–9). Extending that life by keeping them longer makes them greener.
Otherwise, they become poisonous waste. According to the United Nations University (UNU), “Electronic waste, or e-waste, refers to all items of electrical and electronic equipment and its parts that have been discarded by its owner as waste without the intent of reuse.”8 When we throw smartphones away or “recycle” them, they frequently end up as toxic e-waste, the fastest-growing element in global waste streams: about 46 to 50 million metric tons, and growing by three to four percent annually. Cellphones alone comprise approximately ten percent of those figures (Baldé et al., 2018, pp. 39–40). The average period people in the global North keep their phones is less than two years. This is out of habit, not loss of functionality. Retaining them for as long as possible can lighten the flow of e-waste to an already overburdened system.
Calling Bullshit on Anti-Science Propaganda
Like the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries, telecommunications firms have no compunction about using public relations to “war-game science” via campaigns that spread doubt and confusion about ecological problems, from climate change to radiofrequency radiation. The trick involves discrediting researchers who report evidence of harm, while backing scholarship that reports reassuring findings. That scam worked for tobacco corporations for decades, with disastrous results for public health.
But by the time we get to Chapter 3, we’ll be smarter than our phones. We’ll have figured out how to make them greener, and be ready to take on industry scoundrels and gullible journalists. With the air cleared of polluting propaganda, our brief conclusion can offer ideas about what should happen next.
We take these matters very seriously, not only because we are concerned consumers of this technology, but because we have been unknowing stakeholders in its development. Click wheels, multi-touch screens, global-positioning systems, lithium-ion batteries, signal compression, hyper-text markup language, liquid-crystal displays, and a number of other innovations were the result of government funding from publicly funded entities such as the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the US Department of Energy, the CIA, the National Science Foundation, the US Navy, the US Army Research Office, the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Defense – and research universities (Mazzucato, 2015). We paid taxes that made smartphones and their immediate predecessors possible – that’s right, taxes – and private corporations profited.
So, it’s important to acknowledge that we have a responsibility to encourage smartphone owners such as ourselves to go beyond an appreciation of these devices’ utility and understand our relation to the harm they cause. As well as holding onto our phones for as long as possible, we should endeavor to keep up with the related knowledge on technology’s medical, cultural, social, and environmental impact, from media effects to corporate swindles.
We researched and wrote much of this book on mobile devices – that’s the paradox of a project that aims to make smartphones greener from within as well as beyond the boundaries of their guileful promises. Our hope is that How Green Is Your Smartphone? will enable readers who don’t have the time to delve into the relevant studies to contribute to public debate about these gadgets. It’s urgently needed.
1 1. https://www.apple.com/iphone-xr/only-iphone/
2 2. https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/galaxy-s10/
3 3. https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_3?hl=en-US
4 4. http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bell-labs/GWATT
6 6. https://www.apple.com/legal/rfexposure/
7 7. https://www.sehn.org/precautionary-principle-understanding-science-in-regulation
8 8. http://www.step-initiative.org/
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