Figure 4.1 shows the materials found in one type of smartphone. What should we do with our damaged phone, assuming it can’t be fixed? Should we throw it away? Or leave it in a drawer? What if you bought a “circular” or “green” phone, designed for disassembly at the end of its use and made with materials that could be safely reused in another phone or even in a different product? Modular “designed for environment” products are made so that, if they break, only the defective part has to be replaced or repaired. Sustainability can be built into the product life cycle of many things that we buy (Mutingi, Dube and Mbohwa 2017). Using a product over a longer period of time avoids resource use and waste and can allow companies to save money. In the case of smartphones (and other electronic products), countries would have to import much smaller amounts of the materials used to make
them, and new jobs would be created for repairing, reusing, refurbishing and repurposing these products (European Economic and Social Committee 2019).
The smartphone industry is slowly changing (State of Green 2017a; Apple 2019). There are already examples of companies developing phones that are environmentally sustainable (HYLA Mobile Company 2019) and ethically produced (FairPhone 2019). You could be part of the movement that drives this change.
