WHERE Your iphone comes FROm
Most people have one, and many people get a new one every time a new model is released. Since the series debut in 2007, over one billion iphones have been made. That is more than three times the population of the United States. For this project I tried to find out where iphones come from, and where they go after you get a new one. It is important to know that Apple itself does not manufacture the components of your iphone. They are manufactured by hundreds of different companies all over the world. Apple just designs the phones.
What is unknown to most buyers of iphones is that the devices contain hundreds of different minerals, and many rare earth metals, many of which are gained in environmentally destructive ways. The mines where these raw materials come from are often humanitarian catastrophes, with terrible working conditions and child labor. Apple tries to keep its supply chain free of such problems, and has shut down several mines for this reason, but the supply chain is so massive that it is an impossible task. One example of this is Cerro Rico, a Tin mine in Bolivia.
Cerro Rico, or Sumaq Urqu in the Quechua language, means “beautiful mountain”. The area was taken from the Incas by Spanish conquistadors and was immediately utilized to provide silver for the Spanish empire. The native Quechua people were enslaved and forced to work in the Spanish mines under terrible working conditions. Now the silver at Cerro Rico is long gone, but the people are still slaving away in the “mountain that eats men” for another valuable element, tin, an important component of your iphone. The mines at Cerro Rico employ about 16,000 miners who chip away at the rock with pickaxes and carry rocks out of the mines on their backs. The mines have no lighting and no piped in oxygen. The miners work shirtless, with no protection. According to Unicef, the average life expectancy of Cerro Rico miners is 40 years and children as young as six years old are put to work. Hundreds of miners have died from inhaling fine dust and from cave-ins. What makes matters worse is that the the miners make about 18,000 Bolivian Bolivianos annually, which equates to 2,500 dollars, a measly salary compared to the Bolivian average of 41,000 dollars annually. Now Cerro Rico, the mine which so many Bolivians spend every day inside, is in danger of a total collapse. There are 600 mines in the mountain at Cerro Rico, most of which are long abandoned, consisting of over 60 miles of mine shafts. Engineers believe that all this mining has led to a significant loss in structural integrity. The mountain has been hollowed out so much that a collapse might be inevitable. Such a collapse could have catastrophic consequences for miners. In 2010, a copper mine in Chile, just 600 miles south of Cerro Rico, collapsed, entombing 33 miners for 69 days. Fortunately they could all be rescued, but if an event like this happened again, we might not be so lucky. In the Chilean mine disaster geological instability in an old mine and a poor safety record were blamed for the disaster. Sounds a lot like Cerro Rico, right? Engineers have proposed filling the mines with concrete, but as bad as the “mountain that eats men” is, it is also the only source of income the miners have, and shutting it down would be equally disastrous for the people.
Another questionable source of tin for your iphone is Bangka Island, an island in Indonesia, the world’s largest tin exporter. Many mines on this island operate illegally, and have no safety regulations. Miners on Bangka dig with their hands and feet in large sand pits trying to scavenge tin. This pits often collapse, killing dozens of miners at a time. The unofficial count of fatalities on Bangka island this year is 78. Tin mining has also destroyed the island’s rainforest, which has devastating environmental consequences and has disrupted tourism on the island. The mines at Bangka island have also been known to recruit child labor. Indonesia is the world’s second largest exporter of tin, after China, exporting almost a third of the world’s tin. 90% of the tin exported by Indonesia comes from Bangka island. If you do the math, that makes 75,600 metric tons of tin, or about 25% of the world’s tin. Apple sources tin from Bangka island, and they have sent investigators to the island, but conditions have not improved.
Until last year, apple sourced its cobalt from a mud pit in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where young children dug with their hands. To make matters worse, ill sourced metals in the Congo have helped fund armed groups in the ongoing civil war in the DRC, leading to increased violence and killing.
The D.R.C. is also a primary source for another mineral that can be found in your iphone, coltan. Coltan is a mineral that contains tantalum, a rare earth metal that is found in almost every electronic device, including whatever you are reading this on, and - your iphone. The mineral coltan has received immense criticism for its origin in the D.R.C. and the inhumane conditions of coltan mines. Coltan mining operations have been linked all over the world by exploitation and dangerous working conditions. Coltan is mined almost exclusively in underdeveloped countries and conflict regions, and there are no official safety standards for coltan mining. In the D.R.C. and in Colombia, coltan mines are often operated by militias and drug cartels, and children are often forced to work at gunpoint in the mines operated by these groups. Since most coltan mining countries are in some form of conflict, the coltan mining supply chain is extremely hard to trace, and coltan is often smuggled across national borders, which makes its origin unclear. Apple does use some recycled tantalum, but over 70 percent of the material used is still newly mined.
One harmful aspect of iphone production that is often overlooked is the transportation of the raw materials, components, finished phones, and the resulting e-waste. Apple buys components for iphones from over 200 different suppliers, located all over the world. Raw materials have to be shipped from mud pits in the Congo and mountains that eat men in Bolivia to these locations all over the world, and then the components have to be shipped to apple assembly plants in China. Next the finished phones are shipped to the United States, where they are distributed. Finally, our phone is shipped back to South East Asia or Africa to be recycled or end up in a landfill. That is a lot of shipping for one product. Statistics show that shipping could account for 17% of all the global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Already, it accounts for more than twice as many emissions as aviation. Cargo ships also emit sulphur and soot, which can cause respiratory problems including lung cancer.
After all the parts are made, Foxconn, one of Apple’s most significant partners, assembles the phones. Though the company owns numerous facilities all over eastern Asia, most iphones are produced at its Shenzhen, China, assembly plant. Foxconn pays its assembly line workers $400 per month, or $2.50 per hour. Compared to the average monthly salary in Shenzhen of $1288, that is measly. The factory is extremely secretive in its ways, and journalists have been beaten up for taking photographs within the factory. Foxconn, the world's third largest employer, has factory workers work 10 hours a day 6 days a week with frequent overtime. The company has been known to exceed the national limit for work hours in China and has a bad reputation for worker treatment. It also gained attention in 2010 when dozens of the Shenzhen factory’s workers committed suicide, complaining in their suicide letters about harsh working conditions, cruel managers, long working hours, and unkept promises. The company’s response to this was hanging up anti-suicide nets on company buildings and making employees sign pledges not to kill themselves. The actual problems of the company where not addressed.
After assembly in China, your iphone gets shipped to the United States, where it is sold. The most recent iphone, the iphone X, costs between 600 and 1,000 dollars (made by people who make only $2.50 an hour). Most Americans use their iphone for two years before getting a new one. Out of 141 million phones discarded in 2009, only 12 million were recycled. While the rate is probably much higher today, millions of phones are still sent to landfills each year. Every day, over 400,000 cell phones are sent to landfills in the United States. This waste, called e-waste, is highly toxic, containing cadmium and lead. In order to get rid of the dangerous substances, developed countries like the United States just ship their e-waste to landfills in less developed nations like the ones where the raw materials were originally dug up. There, the e-waste leads to environmental harm and is a health risk for the local population. Recycling your phone is a lot better for the environment and your conscience, as some valuable materials, such as gold, can be salvaged. However, the rest of your phone still goes to landfills and pollutes them with dangerous substances. In addition, cell phone recycling poses risks for the people working in the recycling plants, as the air is often contaminated by the e-waste. This is especially an issue in South East Asia, where many cell phones are shipped for recycling. The only truly environmentally conscious way to get rid of your phone is to sell it or donate it to be reused. However every phone will end up on a landfill someday, no matter how often it is reused.
So, that is the life cycle of an iphone: children dig raw materials by hand out of pits in the Congo and mountains that eat men in Bolivia, the materials are shipped all over the world to factories where the components are made, the components are put together in a suicide-factory in China, the finished phone is shipped to you, in the United States, where you keep it for 20 months before throwing it away. Then your phone is shipped to landfills, not far away from the pit in the Congo where your phone's life began.
Works cited:
“Here's What Happens When You Recycle Your Old Cellphone.” Global Citizen, 18 June 2018, www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/recycle-cellphones-ewaste-what-happens/.
Villas-Boas, Skye Gould Antonio. “Here's Where All the Components of Your IPhone Come From.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 12 Apr. 2016, www.businessinsider.com/where-iphone-parts-come-from-2016-4.
Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, www.bloomberg.com/news/photo-essays/2015-08-26/the-tin-mines-of-bangka-island.
“Coltan.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Nov. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan.
“Electronic Waste.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Dec. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste.
Forero, Juan. “Bolivia's Cerro Rico: The Mountain That Eats Men.” NPR, NPR, 25 Sept. 2012, www.npr.org/2012/09/25/161752820/bolivias-cerro-rico-the-mountain-that-eats-men.
“Were the Raw Materials in Your IPhone Mined by Children in Inhumane Conditions?” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 23 July 2017, www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-merchant-iphone-supplychain-20170723-story.html.
Merchant, Brian. “Life and Death in Apple's Forbidden City.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 18 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract.
What is unknown to most buyers of iphones is that the devices contain hundreds of different minerals, and many rare earth metals, many of which are gained in environmentally destructive ways. The mines where these raw materials come from are often humanitarian catastrophes, with terrible working conditions and child labor. Apple tries to keep its supply chain free of such problems, and has shut down several mines for this reason, but the supply chain is so massive that it is an impossible task. One example of this is Cerro Rico, a Tin mine in Bolivia.
Cerro Rico, or Sumaq Urqu in the Quechua language, means “beautiful mountain”. The area was taken from the Incas by Spanish conquistadors and was immediately utilized to provide silver for the Spanish empire. The native Quechua people were enslaved and forced to work in the Spanish mines under terrible working conditions. Now the silver at Cerro Rico is long gone, but the people are still slaving away in the “mountain that eats men” for another valuable element, tin, an important component of your iphone. The mines at Cerro Rico employ about 16,000 miners who chip away at the rock with pickaxes and carry rocks out of the mines on their backs. The mines have no lighting and no piped in oxygen. The miners work shirtless, with no protection. According to Unicef, the average life expectancy of Cerro Rico miners is 40 years and children as young as six years old are put to work. Hundreds of miners have died from inhaling fine dust and from cave-ins. What makes matters worse is that the the miners make about 18,000 Bolivian Bolivianos annually, which equates to 2,500 dollars, a measly salary compared to the Bolivian average of 41,000 dollars annually. Now Cerro Rico, the mine which so many Bolivians spend every day inside, is in danger of a total collapse. There are 600 mines in the mountain at Cerro Rico, most of which are long abandoned, consisting of over 60 miles of mine shafts. Engineers believe that all this mining has led to a significant loss in structural integrity. The mountain has been hollowed out so much that a collapse might be inevitable. Such a collapse could have catastrophic consequences for miners. In 2010, a copper mine in Chile, just 600 miles south of Cerro Rico, collapsed, entombing 33 miners for 69 days. Fortunately they could all be rescued, but if an event like this happened again, we might not be so lucky. In the Chilean mine disaster geological instability in an old mine and a poor safety record were blamed for the disaster. Sounds a lot like Cerro Rico, right? Engineers have proposed filling the mines with concrete, but as bad as the “mountain that eats men” is, it is also the only source of income the miners have, and shutting it down would be equally disastrous for the people.
Another questionable source of tin for your iphone is Bangka Island, an island in Indonesia, the world’s largest tin exporter. Many mines on this island operate illegally, and have no safety regulations. Miners on Bangka dig with their hands and feet in large sand pits trying to scavenge tin. This pits often collapse, killing dozens of miners at a time. The unofficial count of fatalities on Bangka island this year is 78. Tin mining has also destroyed the island’s rainforest, which has devastating environmental consequences and has disrupted tourism on the island. The mines at Bangka island have also been known to recruit child labor. Indonesia is the world’s second largest exporter of tin, after China, exporting almost a third of the world’s tin. 90% of the tin exported by Indonesia comes from Bangka island. If you do the math, that makes 75,600 metric tons of tin, or about 25% of the world’s tin. Apple sources tin from Bangka island, and they have sent investigators to the island, but conditions have not improved.
Until last year, apple sourced its cobalt from a mud pit in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where young children dug with their hands. To make matters worse, ill sourced metals in the Congo have helped fund armed groups in the ongoing civil war in the DRC, leading to increased violence and killing.
The D.R.C. is also a primary source for another mineral that can be found in your iphone, coltan. Coltan is a mineral that contains tantalum, a rare earth metal that is found in almost every electronic device, including whatever you are reading this on, and - your iphone. The mineral coltan has received immense criticism for its origin in the D.R.C. and the inhumane conditions of coltan mines. Coltan mining operations have been linked all over the world by exploitation and dangerous working conditions. Coltan is mined almost exclusively in underdeveloped countries and conflict regions, and there are no official safety standards for coltan mining. In the D.R.C. and in Colombia, coltan mines are often operated by militias and drug cartels, and children are often forced to work at gunpoint in the mines operated by these groups. Since most coltan mining countries are in some form of conflict, the coltan mining supply chain is extremely hard to trace, and coltan is often smuggled across national borders, which makes its origin unclear. Apple does use some recycled tantalum, but over 70 percent of the material used is still newly mined.
One harmful aspect of iphone production that is often overlooked is the transportation of the raw materials, components, finished phones, and the resulting e-waste. Apple buys components for iphones from over 200 different suppliers, located all over the world. Raw materials have to be shipped from mud pits in the Congo and mountains that eat men in Bolivia to these locations all over the world, and then the components have to be shipped to apple assembly plants in China. Next the finished phones are shipped to the United States, where they are distributed. Finally, our phone is shipped back to South East Asia or Africa to be recycled or end up in a landfill. That is a lot of shipping for one product. Statistics show that shipping could account for 17% of all the global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Already, it accounts for more than twice as many emissions as aviation. Cargo ships also emit sulphur and soot, which can cause respiratory problems including lung cancer.
After all the parts are made, Foxconn, one of Apple’s most significant partners, assembles the phones. Though the company owns numerous facilities all over eastern Asia, most iphones are produced at its Shenzhen, China, assembly plant. Foxconn pays its assembly line workers $400 per month, or $2.50 per hour. Compared to the average monthly salary in Shenzhen of $1288, that is measly. The factory is extremely secretive in its ways, and journalists have been beaten up for taking photographs within the factory. Foxconn, the world's third largest employer, has factory workers work 10 hours a day 6 days a week with frequent overtime. The company has been known to exceed the national limit for work hours in China and has a bad reputation for worker treatment. It also gained attention in 2010 when dozens of the Shenzhen factory’s workers committed suicide, complaining in their suicide letters about harsh working conditions, cruel managers, long working hours, and unkept promises. The company’s response to this was hanging up anti-suicide nets on company buildings and making employees sign pledges not to kill themselves. The actual problems of the company where not addressed.
After assembly in China, your iphone gets shipped to the United States, where it is sold. The most recent iphone, the iphone X, costs between 600 and 1,000 dollars (made by people who make only $2.50 an hour). Most Americans use their iphone for two years before getting a new one. Out of 141 million phones discarded in 2009, only 12 million were recycled. While the rate is probably much higher today, millions of phones are still sent to landfills each year. Every day, over 400,000 cell phones are sent to landfills in the United States. This waste, called e-waste, is highly toxic, containing cadmium and lead. In order to get rid of the dangerous substances, developed countries like the United States just ship their e-waste to landfills in less developed nations like the ones where the raw materials were originally dug up. There, the e-waste leads to environmental harm and is a health risk for the local population. Recycling your phone is a lot better for the environment and your conscience, as some valuable materials, such as gold, can be salvaged. However, the rest of your phone still goes to landfills and pollutes them with dangerous substances. In addition, cell phone recycling poses risks for the people working in the recycling plants, as the air is often contaminated by the e-waste. This is especially an issue in South East Asia, where many cell phones are shipped for recycling. The only truly environmentally conscious way to get rid of your phone is to sell it or donate it to be reused. However every phone will end up on a landfill someday, no matter how often it is reused.
So, that is the life cycle of an iphone: children dig raw materials by hand out of pits in the Congo and mountains that eat men in Bolivia, the materials are shipped all over the world to factories where the components are made, the components are put together in a suicide-factory in China, the finished phone is shipped to you, in the United States, where you keep it for 20 months before throwing it away. Then your phone is shipped to landfills, not far away from the pit in the Congo where your phone's life began.
Works cited:
“Here's What Happens When You Recycle Your Old Cellphone.” Global Citizen, 18 June 2018, www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/recycle-cellphones-ewaste-what-happens/.
Villas-Boas, Skye Gould Antonio. “Here's Where All the Components of Your IPhone Come From.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 12 Apr. 2016, www.businessinsider.com/where-iphone-parts-come-from-2016-4.
Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, www.bloomberg.com/news/photo-essays/2015-08-26/the-tin-mines-of-bangka-island.
“Coltan.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Nov. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan.
“Electronic Waste.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Dec. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste.
Forero, Juan. “Bolivia's Cerro Rico: The Mountain That Eats Men.” NPR, NPR, 25 Sept. 2012, www.npr.org/2012/09/25/161752820/bolivias-cerro-rico-the-mountain-that-eats-men.
“Were the Raw Materials in Your IPhone Mined by Children in Inhumane Conditions?” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 23 July 2017, www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-merchant-iphone-supplychain-20170723-story.html.
Merchant, Brian. “Life and Death in Apple's Forbidden City.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 18 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract.