Our Tech Addiction Is Creating a ‘Toxic Soup’
By: Josh Lepawsky
Tags: Electronics, 2069, Industry, Digital Life, Environment

Troubling though the numbers may be, they include none of the waste that arises in the mining, making, or using of those electronics. And there is plenty.

Strip the earth. Get the metal.

In fact, the waste from discarding gadgets is dwarfed by the waste created from mining the materials to make them in the first place. Over the operational life of the Lavender Pit, for example, about 600,000 tons of copper were extracted from the ground. (Your iPhone contains a little less than eight grams of copper. Apple reportedly sold more than 217 million iPhones last year, theoretically requiring some 1,900 tons of copper.)

Getting that much metal from the Lavender Pit also meant generating 256 million tons of waste. That’s about 426 tons of waste for every ton of desirable metal produced from the pit. It’s what miners call a strip ratio. Strip the earth. Get the metal.

Today’s electronics are complex amalgams of plastics, metals, and glass. These materials do not, of course, spring forth from the earth ready to be assembled into chips, screens, phones, or servers.

Plastics, for example, are petroleum products. Canada’s oil sands are a global powerhouse in petroleum products: In 2012, the country’s national statistics agency reported that around 710 million tons of waste was generated from oil sands production. Of course, only some small portion of total oil sands production eventually becomes plastics that might be used to make electronics, but the scale of waste arising from resource extraction begins to put postconsumer e-waste in a different perspective.

Making electronics is an energy- and materials-intensive endeavor. When Seagate, a major data storage device manufacturer, conducted an internal audit of the chemical footprint of its manufacturing, the company found that “the volume of chemicals not incorporated into the products is conservatively estimated to be four times that of product chemistries.” In other words, the amount of chemicals required to make the devices is quadruple the amount of chemicals in the devices themselves.

Seagate’s situation is hardly unique. Many brand manufacturers regularly publish data about the carbon footprints of their devices. Over and over, these companies’ own data show that emissions arising in production usually outweigh those arising from transportation (that is, distribution from factory to consumer), product use, or end-of-life management (or recycling).

Any digital device with a screen involves the use of an especially potent class of greenhouse gasses called fluorinated greenhouse gases (F-GHGs), which are used to etch the thin-film components of flat screens typical of today’s TVs, phones, tablets, and monitors. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s emerging studies of F-GHGs in electronics manufacturing suggest that the use of these gases may be on track to double by next year. If that trend were to continue, F-GHG releases from flat-screen production could double 10 to 16 times over in 50 years.

The Silicon Valley region has more federal Superfund sites than any county in the United States.

That’s almost certainly impossible, which is, in a sense, the whole point. Such doubling would be roughly equivalent to today’s total CO2 emissions from the United States. And so the industry, facing a literally unsustainable manufacturing process, must confront a stark necessity to innovate.