The Basics

What Are in Electronics?

Electronics are made up of plastic, silicon, and an array of chemical elements, including rare earth elements and metals. The average smartphone is made up of 70 or so chemical elements.

Silicon is an important component of electronics because they are the backbone of microchips. More than 634 billion microchips were manufactured in 2019. A microchip is a set of electronic circuits on a small, flat piece of silicon (called a silicon wafer). Silicon is made from silicon dioxide, which commonly exists in nature as quartz and is found in sand.

One important category to talk about is rare earth elements, which—though not as rare as once thought—are essential to modern society. Rare earth elements are a collection of 17 elements common in earth’s crust and found in low concentrations around the world. Rare earth elements have a range of conductive, magnetic and phosphorescent properties that make them crucial to modern technologies. In smartphones, rare earth elements do a number of things, including creating the screen and colour display, aiding conductivity, and allowing your phone to vibrate.

Using a mass spectrometer, researchers at the University of Plymouth have identified the contents of smartphones. In larger volumes, they found: silicon, iron, carbon, calcium, chromium, aluminium, copper, nickel, and tin. They also identified small amounts of: indium, germanium, antimony, niobium, tantalum, molybdenum, cobalt, tungsten, gold, silver, neodymium, praseodymium, gadolinium, dysprosium

How Are Electronics Made?

Electronics supply chains are quite complex—much more complex than any of the other products we have discussed on the podcast so far.

Each of the raw materials used in electronics must be mined and processed, which is itself a multi-step process Then these raw materials are used in electronic components. Those components are then assembled, packaged, distributed, and sold. There is a lot of subcontracting that happens throughout that process. And sometimes we get electronics through telecommunications providers, which makes things even more complicated.

There are three distinct tiers in the computer industry supply chain: (1) hardware component manufacturers, (2) operating system and other software developers, and (3) computer assemblers, known somewhat confusingly as Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). For example, Apple deals with over 750 suppliers to make its products.

Human Rights and Consumer Electronics Production

Human rights abuses largely occur in the mining and manufacturing stages of the supply chain, so that is how I will organize this section.

Mining and Human Rights

Mining in general has a long track record of human rights abuses and environmental destruction. Specific human rights issues differ depending on where the mine is located, the type of mine, and the operating company.

Where Are Key Minerals Mined?

Silicon: China produces two-thirds of the world’s silicon

Aluminium is made by smelting bauxite. Australia, Guinea, and China lead in bauxite mining. The world’s top aluminium producers are China, India, Russia, and Canada.

Copper: Chile, China, Peru, and the United States are the top copper-producing countries.

Lead: China is the leading producer of lead, but Australia, the U.S., Peru, Russia, Mexico, and India are also major producers.

Gold: The top gold producers are China, Australia, Russia, and the U.S.

Workers’ Rights in the Mining Industry

Globally, mine workers often experience unsafe working conditions, low wages, and abuses like excessive working hours and union-busting.

One third of the world’s tin comes from informal mines in Bangka, Indonesia, where a worker dies in a landslide almost once per week.

Lack of protective equipment and safety protocols can expose mining workers and nearby communities to toxic chemicals, leading to a range of health impacts. For example, gold mines are the leading source of mercury air pollution in the U.S.

Mining operations have also been linked to child labour and forced labour.

Conflict Minerals

We will talk about this more in part three of our series, but the term “conflict minerals” refers to tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold that contributed to the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Manufacturing and Workers’ Rights

Like other industries, electronics components manufacturing and assembly have undergone a process of offshoring in recent decades. Offshoring was driven in part by globalization and the availability of low-wage labour, as well as other protections like worker safety rules.

For example, semiconductor manufacturing moved offshore beginning in the 1970s after reports surfaced of contaminated drinking water causing birth defects and cancer clusters among factory workers at electronics manufacturing sites in the U.S.

China has been at the heart of the offshoring of electronics manufacturing. But multinational companies are now shifting production to other Asian countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India, where manufacturing worker wages are lower.

In addition to offshoring, short production cycles have fuelled a rise in precarious work. For example, Chinese assembly factories use student “interns” as a source of cheap and flexible labour. It is a legal practice, but employers frequently violate laws around overtime and the proportion of temporary workers.

Electronics manufacturing has been associated with child labour and forced labour. For example, in 2020 Lenovo laptops bound for a school district in Alabama were stopped at the border by the U.S. Department of Commerce for their connection with China’s forced labour in Xinjiang province.

Foxconn is the most well-known electronics manufacturer, so it is a useful example of working conditions.

Foxconn

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., more commonly known as Foxconn, is the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. Brands like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, HP, Dell, and Huawei contract Foxconn to manufacture products.

Foxconn is a Taiwanese company and the single largest employer in mainland China. It employs 1.3 million people worldwide. Worldwide, only Walmart and McDonald’s employ more people.

An estimated 450,000 of Foxconn’s employees are at a single site in Shenzhen (known as Foxconn City or the Longhua plant). That number is believed to be smaller today, since Foxconn has more factories around the country. It would take nearly an hour to walk across Longhua.

Foxconn’s Longhua plant is very secretive. According to this article in the Guardian: “Security guards man each of the entry points. Employees can’t get in without swiping an ID card; drivers entering with delivery trucks are subject to fingerprint scans. A Reuters journalist was once dragged out of a car and beaten for taking photos from outside the factory walls.”

There have been longstanding labour concerns at Foxconn factories. One of the most prominent of these was in 2010 when 18 employees attempted suicide by jumping off the roof of the factory building.

An investigation by a Hong Kong-based NGO called Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) found that workers experienced: long working hours without overtime pay, mandatory unpaid meetings, constant surveillance, being forced to publicly read statements of self-criticism for making mistakes, punishments such as fines for not meeting high hourly quotas, and a ban on conversation in the workplace.

“Since the iPhone is such a compact, complex machine, putting one together correctly requires sprawling assembly lines of hundreds of people who build, inspect, test and package each device. One worker said 1,700 iPhones passed through her hands every day; she was in charge of wiping a special polish on the display. That works out at about three screens a minute for 12 hours a day. More meticulous work, like fastening chip boards and assembling back covers, was slower; these workers have a minute apiece for each iPhone. That’s still 600 to 700 iPhones a day. Failing to meet a quota or making a mistake can draw public condemnation from superiors. Workers are often expected to stay silent and may draw rebukes from their bosses for asking to use the restroom.” (The Guardian)

Foxconn workers are typically migrants from other parts of China. Foxconn City is not only a workplace, but also where employees live. That gives the company immense power over people. It can also be quite isolating for workers, because you are always on the worksite. Tian Yu, a worker who attempted suicide, reported that her shifts were always being changed and her roommates were from other parts of China, which presented linguistic barriers. The factory complex was, she said, “a massive place of strangers.”

Yu received no wages for her first month because of an administrative error. To fix the error, she had to take a bus to another factory of 130,000 people where no one would help her locate her wage card. Yu attempted suicide shortly after this, when her second-hand cellphone broke and she could not afford to replace it because she had no money. She had only worked at Foxconn for 37 days.

After the suicides garnered media attention, Foxconn installed nets and forced workers to sign pledges not to self-harm. But reporting suggests that there have not been meaningful improvements in working conditions in the last decade.

Consumer Electronics Production and the Environment

Most of the CO2 emissions from smartphones, tablets, and computers (66% to 73%) is from manufacturing—rather than distribution, use, or end of life. Only about a fifth of the emissions from electronics comes from our actual usage of the product.

Producing electronics involves high levels of hazardous chemicals, greenhouse gases, and water use. The average computer uses 240kg of fuel, 22 kilograms of chemicals, and 1,500 litres of water to produce. To make a microchip requires 16,000 litres of water, 1.6 kilograms of fuel, and 0.7 kilograms of chemicals.

One way to think about the footprint of a product is to consider how much “invisible waste” is created through the production process. Producing a typical smartphone generates about 86 kilograms of invisible waste. Producing a typical laptop generates 1,200 kilograms of invisible waste.cThis far outweighs the waste produced for producing a kilogram of beef (4 kilograms of waste) and a pair of cotton trousers (25 kilograms of waste).

Why is the volume of invisible waste so high? It is because of the waste produced in mining the raw materials for electronics.

Mining and the Environment

Mining is destructive to the environment and produces a lot of waste.

When you want to create a mine site, the first step is exploration to determine the value of the mineral ore deposit. The exploratory phase has an environmental impact. During this phase, companies undertake exploratory excavations and clear areas of vegetation to allow heavy vehicles with drilling rigs.

Then if the mine site is deemed valuable enough, it has to be developed. During development, area is cleared to construct roads to the site. The site itself is also cleared, which can cause significant environmental impact.

Then mining itself starts. There are different mining methods.

Open pit mining is basically digging a very big hole. Open pit or surface mining is typically used for shallower or less valuable deposits. It involves the removal of plant life, soil and bedrock to reach resource deposits. Extracting rare earth elements cost-effectively often requires open pit mining. Then there is underground mining: this method involves digging down into the earth and creating tunnels and shafts to reach deposits. Underground mines are more expensive, and are used to reach deeper deposits.

Most mining operations involve an enormous quantity of ordinary rock or soil that must be removed. These rocks sometimes contain significant levels of toxic substances.

Once the ore has been extracted, the next step is to grind it and separate the metal from non-metallic material in a process called beneficiation. Depending on the process used, this process produces waste rock dumps, tailings, heap leach materials and dump leach materials. These wastes are managed through different techniques, including tailings ponds, drying the tailings and disposing of them as backfill, and submarine tailings disposal. Environmentally, drying the tailings is preferred but tailings ponds are by far the most commonly used method.

When mining is done, the mine must be closed. Mines can produce immense environmental impact after being closed if not done responsibly.

Mining can be very wasteful, depending on the method and the deposit. For example, getting a single ounce of gold out of the earth can create up to 91 tons of waste.

When mined materials are excavated mand exposed to oxygen and water they can produce acid, which in turn can leach or dissolve metals and other contaminants from mined materials to form an acidic solution.

This acid drainage and other forms of contaminant leaching can have a considerable impact on water quality. It is particularly harmful because it can continue indefinitely and is virtually impossible to stop once the reactions begin. Acid can harm to fish, animals, humans, and plants. Toxic metals can contaminate streams and groundwater at great distances, causing impacts to aquatic life and animals depend on contaminated water. Mining operations can also cause soil and sediment erosion, which can degrade surface water quality.

Tailings ponds can contaminate groundwater and leach toxic substances, especially if these facilities are not fitted with an impermeable liner. When rainfall is high, dam breaks at tailings ponds can create devastating environmental consequences.

Mining pollutes the air when particulate matter is transported by the wind. This can occur for a number of reasons, including blasting and wind erosion. Gas emissions from fuel combustion, explosions, and mineral processing can also cause air pollution. For example, gold mining is the leading source of mercury air pollution.

Mining, especially open pit mining, involves the destruction of habitats, which can significantly impact wildlife and ecosystems.

Mining can also contaminate soil in the surrounding area, which can cause harm to nearby farmers.

Deep sea mining is a new phenomenon, but in the next three to five years it could be a source of minerals for electronics. Deep sea mining could irreparably disturb marine ecosystems that we know very little about.

Rare Earth Mineral Refining and Toxic Waste

Refining rare earth minerals creates toxic and radioactive waste. That is because rare earth minerals always occur alongside the radioactive elements thorium and uranium, and it is complicated to separate them safely. According to reporting by Mother Jones:

“Miners use heavy machinery to reach the raw ore, which contains anywhere between 3 and 9 percent rare earths, depending on the deposit. Then the ore is taken to a refinery and “cracked,” a process wherein workers use sulfuric acid to make a liquid stew of sorts. The process is also hugely water- and energy-intensive, requiring a continuous 49 megawatts (enough to power 50,000 homes) and two Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water every day. Workers then boil off the liquid and separate out the rare earths from rock and radioactive elements. This is where things get dangerous: Companies must take precautions so that workers aren’t exposed to radiation. If the tailings ponds where the radioactive elements are permanently stored are improperly lined, they can leach into the groundwater. If they are not covered properly, the slurry could dry and escape as dust. And this radioactive waste must be stored for an incomprehensibly long time—the half-life of thorium is about 14 billion years, and uranium’s is up to 4.5 billion years. Reminder: Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old.”

In many places where rare earth refining occurs, environmental laws are weak and poorly enforced, which allows companies to process these elements “on the cheap”. To give a few examples:

Most of China’s rare-earth mines are clustered in the Baotou region of Inner Mongolia. Communities around one mine blame at least 66 cancer deaths on leaked radioactive waste, and locals complain of hair and teeth falling out.

Another example is the former Mitsubishi Chemical refinery in Bukit Merah, Malaysia run by a subsidiary called Asian Rare Earth. Villagers blamed the mine for birth defects and eight leukemia deaths. In 1992 activists convinced Mitsubishi to close the refinery and spend an estimated $100 million to clean up the mine site. In 2010, a local newspaper visited Asian Rare Earth’s dump site and found 80,000 drums containing 4.2 million gallons of thorium hydroxide, which is radioactive. Although the Bukit Merah mine is closed, an Australian mining company called Lynas has opened a refinery in the nearby town of Kuantan.

China now controls 80 percent of the global output of rare earth elements.

Until the 1990s, though, the Mountain Pass mine in California was the only rare earths mine in the world. Mountain Pass closed in 2002 because environmental regulations made American rare earths more expensive than those mined and refined elsewhere. There was an attempt to revive the Mountain Pass mine in 2008, but the company that ran it fell into financial difficulties and the mine was sold to a Chinese-backed consortium in 2014. Now minerals from Mountain Pass are exported for processing in China. The story of Mountain Pass highlights the clash between global capitalism and the protection of the environment and human health.

E-Waste and the Environment

According to the United Nations, we produced approximately 53.6 million tons of electronic waste (e-waste) in 2019. E-waste is the world’s fastest growing waste stream, and it is set to double by 2050. Up to 90% of the world’s electronic waste is illegally dumped or traded, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

The e-waste problem has two intersecting causes: the short lifespan of electronics and the fact that we do not recycle most electronics.

Eliminating Repairability and Planned Obsolescence

Consumer electronics markets are geared toward selling us products that we must replace every few years, rather than providing something that is meant to last.

Many electronics are designed to be unfixable: devices are made difficult to open, components are glued or soldered together, and components are incorporated together. So, if something breaks you either need to pay for the manufacturer to repair your product or replace the item. Smartphones are perhaps the clearest example of this. The average portable electronic device lasts only two years.

And even though it is illegal to make warranties conditional on using specific repair services, the practice is very common.

Planned obsolescence is an even more egregious practice that shortens the lifespan of consumer electronics. It entails deliberately designing products to fail prematurely or become out-of-date, with the aim of selling another product or an upgrade. Apple and Samsung were both fined for planned obsolescence in 2018.

Right to Repair

The right to repair movement has arisen in response to the short lifespan of modern consumer electronics. The right to repair is about giving consumers choice: allowing consumers their choice of repairer and ensuring access to replacement parts and information to maintain existing devices.

Choose companies that support a right to repair. iFixit rates smartphones on repairability. Check out their ratings here.

Apple is a vocal opponent of the right to repair movement. Apple has improved its repairing practices, but its activities are all structured around repairing products in-house.

E-waste Recycling

Only 25% of electronics of any kind—and only 11% of phones and other mobile devices—are collected for recycling. Only about 17% is actually recycled. And although rare earth minerals are recyclable, only about 1% currently are being recycled.

As we discussed in our very first episode, e-waste represents an estimated $55 billion in value annually. There are valuable metals and minerals in our phones. So, recycling e-waste potentially a very lucrative gig. So why doesn’t it happen more?

Recycling electronics is notoriously dangerous, because of the toxic materials in electronic devices. So, doing it safely and humanely is expensive. As a result, about a third of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. gets exported, mostly to Asia. In Canada that number is lower—about 16%—but still significant.

E-waste Dumping and Smuggling

E-waste smuggling is worth an estimated $3.74 billion annually, making it one of the most profitable organized crime rackets in Asia.

China used to be the primary site for e-waste smuggling, but the Chinese government has increased its enforcement and regulation of e-waste recycling and so the practice is moving to other Asian countries.

Informal e-waste recycling mostly occurs within poor communities, where workers with no protective equipment pick apart electronics by hand. They remove the important plastics and metals and melt them together, which releases toxins into air. Leftovers are often burned, which creates even more airborne toxins. They then sell the recycled materials to electronics producers like Foxconn.

Informal e-waste recycling can cause health problems for workers and people in surrounding communities. In the Chinese city of Guiyu, for example, children were found to have higher than average levels of lead in their blood.

What You Can Do

Extend the Life of Your Products

If everyone kept their phone for an extra year, we could save 2.1 million tonnes of CO2 annually—the equivalent of keeping a million cars off the roads.

When you are buying electronics, look for durability and repairability. Then, once you have it extend its lifespan by repairing or replacing components when they break.

Many cities have repair cafés. In the U.K. the Restart Project hosts local repair parties. You can also take your device to an independent repair shop.

Or try fixing it yourself using iFixit’s tutorials! iFixit is a U.S.-based wiki with free repair tutorials for a range of products. A lot of the repair guides on this website are electronics and appliances, but you can also find guides for repairing things like apparel, kitchenware, and furniture.

Get a Used or Refurbished Device

For smartphones, if buying second-hand choose a model that came out within the last three years to ensure good battery life or look for a model with a replaceable batter.

If looking for a refurbished laptop or desktop, you can often use an older model.

Check out this Ethical Consumer guide for buying second-hand technology.

Support Leading Brands

If buying new, choose a company that is a leader on ethical issues that matter to you. Some considerations that we think are important include:

Supply chain transparency: do they publish a list of their suppliers? Do they have a supplier code of conduct and how robust is it?
End of life: Does this company take responsibility for product end of life? Do they have an e-waste recycling program and how good is it?
Conflict minerals: Do they do due diligence? Are they actively involved in conflict-free initiatives in the D.R. Congo?
Tax justice: Do they pay their fair share of tax?
Climate change: Does this company have a carbon neutrality target? Do they measure their carbon? What is their plan to get to carbon neutrality?

For smartphones, Fairphone is a great ethical option. It is a modular phone, which means that it is designed so you can easily repair it and replace parts. Previous iterations of Fairphone only worked in Europe, but Fairphone 3 now works everywhere in the world!

Fairphone has mapped its entire supply chain to ensure that it sources materials responsibly. It also uses a modular design that allows you to replace and repair components as needed. Fairphone is the only smartphone company that received a positive rating from Ethical Consumer’s mobile phones guide.

To help you make your choice, take a look at ethical ratings by the Good Shopping Guide and Ethical Consumer.

Recycle Your Electronics at End of Life

If your electronics are still in good condition, consider selling it or giving it to a friend.

If you can still turn on your smartphone, you can send it to Fairphone and they will give you a discount on the Fairphone 3. Some companies have in-house recycling programs, but only for their products.

Or look for municipal or community electronic recycling programs. In some places charities like Oxfam will recycle e-waste, so look for that as well.

Get Political

Ask for right to repair legislation: Canadians, you can sign this petition.
Support legislation requiring manufacturers to recycle e-waste.
Ask your government to join the Basel Ban Amendment, which prohibits the export of hazardous e-waste to developing countries, so it can become international law.
Sign this petition calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining.