September 19, 2022 • 43 mins
The Fairphone company's mission is to make smartphones that are repairable, rely on sustainable and recycled materials, and that aren't contributing to troublesome operations in your typical electronics supply chain. So we take this opportunity to turn a critical eye to the tech industry to understand why Fairphone's mission is so important.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech stuff, a production from I heart radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I heart radio,
and how the Tech Are you? Recently I was invited
to speak on the radio about the fair phone four,
(00:24):
which is the latest smartphone from fair phone, and in
the process I realized that this company and this line
of products really opens up the opportunity to talk about
a lot of serious issues in tech, issues that the
fair phone looks to try and avoid and to bring
attention to. So these are issues like the ethical sourcing
(00:47):
of materials and labor, sustainability and e waste and also
repair ability. So I figured today we're gonna talk about
the fair phone four only a little bit, and how
it opens the door to talk about these issues in
tech and why they're important and why they're really complicated.
And I could have started, you know, anywhere, but I
(01:08):
decided to tackle those in order that I mentioned them.
So I'M gonna start off with ethical sourcing. It is
very easy for us to be reductive in our thinking
when we look at any particular electronic device. Consider your
typical smartphone. In fact, let's be specific. Let's say that
we're talking about an iphone. Now I'm going to add
(01:28):
that apple has, on and off, done some serious work
to try and make ethical choices when it comes to
the manufacturing of its devices, particularly in the wake of
scrutiny that was directed toward apple because there were some
very high profile tragedies, like worker depths in China related
to apple production. Um, the company has not maintained a
(01:54):
stellar record like I'll talk about a bit more later,
but anyway, apple at least has been in the public
eye for this issue and when you look at an Iphone,
you might think, oh well, this just this came from apple,
but of course the truth of the matter is that
it gets far more complex than that. I think there's
a great way to kind of illustrate this. There's a
(02:16):
song that's called the guns song and it comes from
Stephen Sondheim's musical assassins. The musical is about the various
people who assassinated or attempted to assassinate a U S
president over the course of the history of the United States. Now,
the character singing this part of the guns song in
(02:36):
question is Leon Frank Chol Gas, who assassinated President Mckinley
on September six, N one and Chol Gas sings. Quote.
It takes a lot of men to make a gun.
Hundreds many men to make a gun. Men in the
minds to dig the iron, men in the mills to
forge the steel, minute machines to turn the barrel, mold
(02:59):
the trigger, shape the wheel. It takes a lot of
men to make a gun. One Gun. End. Quote, and
Hill Gods is right. He's pointing out that this one
thing that someone can hold and they can own and
they can use is actually the product of work from
hundreds of people. Also, at the end of the song
(03:19):
he makes it a point to say that this production,
this manufacturing process, can cost many lives before the gun
is ever fired. In other words, this gun effectively killed
people even though it hadn't even been fully built yet,
because people had died in the making of it. Well,
the same thing, tragically, is true with our electronics. Our
(03:42):
devices don't magically come out of a big building that
has computer factory or smartphone manufacturing facility on the side.
Our electronics are the product of many, many steps in
a complicated and interconnected supply chain. We saw how dangerous
the supply chain can be when it was disrupted and
(04:03):
continues to be disrupted in the wake of the pandemic,
and it brought a lot more attention to it, but
it's attention more to how it inconveniences us or how
it affects businesses less so about the conditions going on
at various points of the supply chain. And there are
many points in that chain where there are big, troubling problems.
(04:28):
Let's start with raw materials. So our devices rely on
some materials that we think of as being pretty scarce.
We call them rare earth elements. Sometimes you will hear
rare earth minerals or rare earth metals. We frequently will
say rare earth elements just to kind of lump them
all into one category. Now, that's a bit of a misnomer. Actually,
(04:53):
they're not that rare. It's just it's very hard to
find a lot of those material eels in a single place. Uh,
it's that you know, you you don't find veins of
ore of these rare earth elements. You can't just dig
and say, Oh, I found a vein of whatever. So
(05:15):
instead what you have to do is gather up huge
clumps of earth and stone, minerals, and you have to
treat it so that you can separate the rare earth
elements from that Earth. So you've got to displace a ton,
literally literally tons, of earth and then treat it in
(05:36):
order to get at the stuff that we need in
order to have them incorporated into our electronics and make
them work. Now, if we were lied on places in
the world that maintained strict controls when it comes to
how you can treat workers and how you protect the
environment in the process of your operations, that amount of
(06:00):
effort and attention would end up translating into higher costs
and manufacturing. So, for example, we might identify a region
in the United States that could be ideal for mining
certain rare earth elements that we would use for electronics.
But if we did that, any operation would have to
(06:21):
follow these strict rules, because that's the law in the
United States, and those rules would cover stuff like the
environmental impact of the operations. A lot of mining operations
use explosives to blast out deep pits and they also
tend to rely on enormous pools filled with toxic chemicals,
and those chemicals leach out the stuff you want from
(06:44):
everything else and then you dump everything else into a
waste pit, or sometimes you might just have the toxic
pool become the waste pit over time. So you essentially
create enormous amounts of soil and rocks that you dump
into these toxic pools. You let the chemicals do their
work and extract the stuff that's in these teeny tiny
(07:07):
concentrations within this massive earth and then you generate an
enormous amount of spoil and this is the product of
your mining. Now that toxic pool is obviously hazardous for
the environment. We're talking about chemicals that can cause direct
harm if you're exposed to them, or long term harm
(07:27):
if it gets into things like the water supply. It's
also obviously hazardous for the people who are working at
these operations. Now a lot of this particular kind of
work happens in China, which has a terrible human rights record.
There is a mine in the Mongolia region of China
where more than of all the rare earth elements mind
(07:48):
in the country comes from. So out of all of China,
one mind accounts for more than of all rare earth
elements taken out of that country. It's called the by
an oboe mine. It represents more than the total known
earth rare earth elements in the world and almost half
(08:09):
of all the rare earth elements that we need come
from this one mine. It's been an operation as a
rare earth elements mine since nine before that it was
an iron mine. Anyway, this extraction process leaves behind lots
of waste. There's toxic wastewater which is filled with stuff
like heavy metals and radioactive materials and other dangerous stuff.
(08:33):
If that water does get into the water supply, then
you're looking at a really hazardous situation for all the
people within that region who access that water table. It's
not unusual in areas around these kinds of operations to
see an increase in cancer rates for the populations in
that region. Uh, it is possible to mine rare earth
(08:56):
elements more responsibly, but that takes more time, takes more effort.
Thus it's more expensive, and so you have to first
work in a place that takes these things seriously. China
is not one of those places and a place that
doesn't treat workers as expendable. And for the record, there
are rare earth element reserves in other parts of the world,
(09:17):
like the United States, really does have some rare earth
element deposits, but because of those strict rules about limiting
environmental damage and mitigating the risk to human populations, including
the workforce, you don't see them. Those operations happen because
it would be way more expensive. That would either cut
into the profits of the electronics companies or, more likely,
(09:40):
result in an increase price to the consumer, or maybe
both of those things. Anyway, that's just one part of
the supply chain, the mining process that has a dark side.
And there are other mining operations that also have a
truly disturbing dark side. One of those happens in Africa,
(10:02):
specifically in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the
D R C, and Y'all, I'm gonna warn you this
gets grim now. The first thing you have to understand
is that the D R C has had an incredibly
violent and chaotic past due to things like colonialism, civil war,
(10:23):
war in nearby nations, rampant government corruption and even more
rampant exploitation of the natives of the region, and I
do think it's important to understand at least a very
quick history of the D R C to get a
context for, as you know, as far as how the
rest of the world helps perpetuate an ongoing crisis within
(10:46):
this country. So let's get a quick rundown of its history,
and I stress this is the barest bones. I am
not doing any justice to the Democratic Republic of the
Congo with this quick history, but I to kind of
paint a picture of the plight of the people in
this in this country. So much has happened there, but
(11:07):
generally speaking, the native peoples of the Democratic Republic of
the Congo have been the subject of abuse and exploitation
for about a hundred fifty years. At first it was
King Leopold of Belgium. He claimed the entire region as
his own personal property and he sent agents there to
oversee operations that forced locals to work in the rubber
(11:31):
trade or they risked losing life and limb. Literally, there
was a practice for a while where if someone was
resisting the authority of the king, that person might get
their arm lopped off, absolutely brutal. Then in the early
twentieth century, under intense international pressure, King Leopold would hand
(11:55):
over the control of the region to the Belgian parliament.
This is where the region became known as the Belgian Congo,
and at that point very large companies mostly Belgian companies
replaced Leopold's agents, but the people of the region were
still oppressed and exploited. It's just now they were exploited
(12:16):
by these companies as opposed to the king's representatives. Over time,
folks discovered there were other valuable resources besides rubber in
the region that would eventually become the D R c.
There was copper, for example. Later on they discovered uranium there.
So as the atomic age advanced, countries like the then
(12:39):
Soviet Union and the United States became very interested in
the region, and both the USSR and the USA, as
well as several other first world nations, would start to
interfere in the region. Some sides would shore up rebel
forces UH and some sides would shore up dictators. The
(13:00):
United States supported dictators because the so union was funding
rebel forces, and it was all in an effort to
secure access to those resources. You don't kid yourself in
thinking that either the USSR or the United States were
really concerned for the people in the region. They were
concerned for those resources and they would take whatever means
(13:22):
necessary in order to make sure the other side couldn't
get it. Meanwhile, the people of the nation continued to
Labor under inhumane conditions. Now the region gained independence in
nineteen sixty because Belgium realized that it was not going
to be able to keep a lid on things much longer.
There was a growing sense of independence in the country.
Belgium did not have the resources to be able to
(13:45):
suppress that, so there was a move to become a democratic,
independent nation in nineteen sixty. But this opened up opportunities
for other countries to try and install leaders within the
Congo that would be more in client to trade with
one side versus the other, uh and ultimately it gave
(14:05):
a man named Mobutu the chance to declare himself president
of the country in nineteen sixty five. Mobutu was incredibly corrupt.
You could say he was using a lot of the
same tactics as King Leopold and those large companies from
decades earlier, and he was embezzling tons of money in
order to fund his own private wealth. Things would get
(14:27):
even more complicated over the following decades. By the nineteen nineties,
there was a civil war in neighboring Rwanda and a
genocide in Rwanda, and that ended up leading to conflict
in what would be the D R C at this
point in history. It was not the DRC yet. They
had gone from the Belgian Congo to becoming the Republic
of Zaire under Mobutu. And you know, Mo Bout was
(14:51):
essentially a dictator who was calling himself a president, someone
who was running unopposed an election after election, and the
incredible pressure from the civil war forced him to flee
the nation. But things did not necessarily get better from there.
I'll talk about it more when we come back after
this quick break. We're back, all right. We left off
(15:22):
with Mobutu fleeing what was then called the Republic of Zaire,
and the new leaders of the Congo renamed it the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. So that's where we get
its current name. This is a nation that has gone
under many names over its history, but the corruption within
the region at all levels of government and business, ran
(15:46):
super deep. It's not like everything magically got better once
Mobu too was deposed, essentially. And there were pockets in
the DRC where military rebels were relying on forced labor
are including child labor, to mine for materials like copper
and then later cobalt. Cobalt is incredibly useful in electronics.
(16:09):
That's where we're really going to focus for the rest
of this conversation. So the armed rebels would sell these
raw materials to buyers, essentially manufacturing companies, and then they
would use the money they made from selling the raw
materials to buy weapons and to try and gain more
control over their various territories. All right, it gets worse.
(16:33):
The fact that the D R C sits on top
of deposits of valuable resources means that there's an ongoing
pressure from the rest of the world to get access
to those raw materials way of the list. On of
those nations is China. In fact, there are a handful
of Chinese mining companies that have exclusive rights to specific
areas within the DRC to mine for cobalt in particular. So,
(16:56):
like I said, cobalts used in a lot of stuff,
including many types of lithium batteries, and our electronics rely
on batteries. We know that there's an increased dependence upon batteries.
In fact, if we want to have a future where
electric vehicles replace internal combustion engine vehicles, we're gonna need
a lot more batteries. So you've got these areas within
(17:18):
the D R C where Chinese companies are overseeing dangerous
mining operations and effectively are in control of those regions
within the D R C. Like you have Chinese companies
that are essentially ruling parts of the Democratic Republic of
the Congo. So you've also got these impoverished communities within
(17:40):
the D R C that are attempting to get at
least a little autonomy to be able to profit from
their own resources. People who live on land and that
they discover that they have cobalt on their land, they
often find themselves forced off and incapable of profiting off
their own property. This can actually escalate in to brutal
(18:00):
confrontations with armed police and military. There's a twenty one
piece in the New Yorker that's titled the Dark Side
of Congo's cobalt rush and I urge you to read it. Uh,
the piece goes into a lot more detail on the
stuff I'm talking about, but essentially, the people of the
D R C have had very little agency for multiple generations.
(18:24):
There are entire towns that have been uprooted and forced
to move, with people scattering all over the place as
a Chinese mining operation has swooped in to demolish houses
and turn what was once a town into just a
bunch of minds. And there's a lack of safety precautions
in these mining operations, which means the actual people doing
(18:46):
the mining, many of them children, face life threatening situations regularly,
and the presence of armed police and military, who are
essentially paid off by the Chinese to keep things in line,
will often mean that you run the risk of being
beaten for any kind of resistance to the normal process
of operations. And, like I said, there's this ongoing issue
(19:08):
of child labor in the region. It's something that has
gained global attention and occasionally you see companies do something
about it, like Apple. Apple has now and again attempted
to address this problem, though the article in The New
Yorker specifically alleges that apple pretty much abandoned any attempts
(19:29):
to be serious about that once the heat was off
the company. So you know, they made an effort for
a while and then, when people stop paying attention, they
just went back to the old old way. So the
human cost is very high. And keep in mind so
far we're only talking about raw materials. Let's also talk
about the manufacturing process. See, when we move up the
(19:51):
supply chain, then we have to talk about taking raw
materials and turning them into components that will later get
assembled into finished products. Now, some of these steps happen
in places where things aren't too rough, but ultimately it
all goes back to places like China. While your major
tech companies aren't reliant upon mainland China for microprocessors, because
(20:13):
that honor tends to go to Taiwan. Taiwan is off
the coast of China and it is independent of the mainland,
though mainland China disputes that point. But you know, if
you're talking about assembly and packaging, then that's all out
of China. In fact, these processes usually take place in
different facilities hundreds or thousands of miles apart. So you're
(20:35):
shipping stuff all over Asia just for it to become
a finished product. You know, it kind of gets back
to that song from assassins it takes a lot of
men to make a gun. In this case, your iphone
has traveled the world in some ways before it ever
got to you. Anyway, according to researchers like Henry Young
(20:56):
of the National University of Singapore, more than half of
the world's electronics are at some point going through a
process of manufacturing within China, and the country has a
reputation for very harsh working conditions, which includes unreasonable punishments
for even minor offenses. And it was so bad that
(21:17):
the economic rights institute looked into more than a hundred
fifty cases between ten and which workers at these kinds
of facilities committed or attempted to commit suicide. The researchers
found that low wages, anxiety over job security, a massive
turnover problem and harsh punishments, as well as a feeling
(21:40):
that no one in the managerial capacity ever even gave
a crap about them, all contributed to folks having such
despondents that they considered suicide. Now this became global news
when there were actually a string of suicides, more than
a dozen of them, and a manufacturing company called Fox
(22:00):
con in and sadly, the reason the world really took
notice is because Fox con is one of Apple's big suppliers.
It's part of Apple's supply chain. If it hadn't been
for that connection to apple, I would wager that those
depths would not have received much coverage outside of China.
Probably not that much inside of China, and that is
(22:24):
absolutely unthinkable to me, but it's the it's the truth. Now,
over the last decade, wages for workers in these facilities
has slowly improved. The low wages have gotten better over
the last several years, which has raised the cost of
doing business in China. So it's a little more expensive
to have your manufacturing processes operate in China because they're
(22:46):
paying people more, but because China has such a well
developed manufacturing infrastructure means it's still the main choice over
alternatives like Vietnam and India, where you know the Labor
could be a lot cheaper. Again, you get into real
problems with all this. But the reason why companies aren't
(23:07):
necessarily flocking to Vietnam and India for all of their manufacturing.
Some of them are dipping their toe in that, but
the reason they're not rushing to it is that these
these countries have a lack of infrastructure when you compare
it to China. So there's this kind of balancing act
that companies are doing, saying well, well, well, we'll continue
(23:28):
to operate in China while we start to see manufacturing
infrastructure built out in other nations where we might be
able to exploit cheaper labor so that our our costs
come down. But yeah, that's the main reason that the
world turned to China in the first place. It's because
the labor costs were so low that it kept the
overall cost of manufacturing down, and thus it could mean that,
(23:52):
you know, the consumer sees less expensive electronics. You know,
they might still be pricey, but they're not as expensive
as they would be if, you know, we were being
better stewards of the environment and treating people as human beings. So, yeah,
it comes at the cost of a lot of lives
along the way. Financially it might cost less, but the
social cost is and the environmental cost is very high.
(24:15):
All right, that's enough. I know that I get on
a soapbox and it sounds like I'm preaching. We're gonna
switch our thoughts over to sustainability and recycling. Still gonna
be a little preachy. Apologized for that. It's just the
way it works. So, as we've already covered, getting the
raw materials for our electronics includes a lot of practices
that are harmful not just to humans but also the environment.
(24:36):
And meanwhile the Electronics Industry is built upon a practice
of consume and replace. By that I mean we in
the developed world our condition to replace our stuff on
a regular basis. Um computers are they tend to last
five to eight years if you've taken good care of them.
(24:57):
That's assuming you don't need to upgrade to a more
recent system. You know, frequently, like if you're a pro
Gamer or something, you might be upgrading your system until
the motherboard can't support anymore and then you swap it
all out, and so you might be changing your rig
fairly regularly. People like me, where I'm using a work
computer to do some pretty light work, I can get
(25:20):
away with using the same machine for several years in
a row. But then with smartphones there's this push to
upgrade every two years or less. You know, we get
new models with new features every single year and they're
marketed to us as being a big improvement over the
stuff that came out the year before. The old contract
systems that were with carriers here in the United States
(25:42):
meant that you used to have the chance to renew
your agreement, your agreement with whatever carrier you use, every
two years and you would get a phone for a
highly subsidized price. So the actual cost of the phone
could be lower, even free, depending upon the plan. That's
not as common these days. We don't see those subsidized
phones as frequently in the United States as we used to,
(26:05):
but it got people into the habit of thinking every
two years or so that they needed a new phone.
Some people it's even more frequently. They they want to
get the newest model as soon as it comes out.
But then what happens to all the old phones and computers?
Like we've created this culture where we have manufactured the
(26:26):
desire for new products. Well, the old products have to
go somewhere. Right. Where do we put them? You know,
you shouldn't just throw them away, although a lot of
people do. Uh. For one thing, you might have some
important information stored on there somewhere and you really need
to make sure you've gone through and thoroughly, uh, formatted
and deleted all that stuff so that someone doesn't come
(26:49):
into possession of one of your old pieces of equipment
and get access to information they should not be able
to access. But for another thing, if the electronics still works,
like if you have a smartphone you want to upgrade
but your old smartphone still works. Well, you could donate
your old smartphone to an organization that can make sure
that someone who otherwise would not have that kind of
(27:12):
a device can get it. If it's a device that
doesn't work, it still contains valuable and, in some cases,
toxic materials in it, and you know you don't want
the toxic stuff to go into a landfill where it
might leach out and contaminate the environment. That's obviously something
that no one wants to have happened. And you don't
(27:34):
want to waste the valuable stuff that's in your electronics either.
Right like there's stuff in there that could be used again,
even if the device itself is shot. There are components, there's,
you know, copper, there's even gold. There are other things
that are dangerous stuff too, like mercury and lead. So
you don't go cracking into your old electronics hoping that
(27:55):
you're gonna be panning for gold in them, but it
would be a great idea to risk cycle the electronics
in those cases in order to reclaim those valuable materials
and use them again instead of them just going into
a landfill. Now I will caution you, because the recycling
process is also a complicated one. We've talked about it
(28:15):
on this show before. There are some electronics recycling companies
that just gather up enormous amounts of electronics. They pack
cargo containers full of them, they ship them overseas, often
to places like China, and the recycling operations, the reclamation operations,
(28:37):
are actually very similar to how rare earth element minds
end up separating the materials from Earth in the first place.
They often rely on caustic, toxic chemicals to leach that
stuff out of the electronics and thus be able to
reclaim it, and those operations can put workers at risk.
(29:01):
There are entire towns in China that became dangerous to
live in due to the chemicals that were being used
to pull valuable stuff out of old electronics. So even
when you're trying to do the responsible thing with your
old devices and recycle them, you can inadvertently participate in
a system that exploits people and causes harm. There are
(29:24):
ethical electronics recycling programs out there, but it takes some
legwork to find them. Once you do, those old electronics
can be processed and materials can be reclaimed to be
used in future products. That's what the Fair Phone Company
strives to do. So rather than source materials that come
from places like the D R C, where it's far
(29:46):
more likely that they came out of an operation that
has a terrible disregard for the safety of its workforce.
The stuff is coming from old electronics that no longer
have a use. They're relying heavily on recycled materials in
order to get access to those, those raw components. Now,
reducing our reliance on new material boost sustainability and that's
(30:08):
a huge benefit in the long run, at least on
the environmental side. On the humanitarian side, things get awfully complicated,
because what do you do about taking jobs away, like
if you if you remove the demand for cobalt within
the D R C and these Chinese companies all pull
up stakes, what takes its place? Because you you have
(30:31):
a region that has been unstable for generations, largely due
to interference from other countries, and the answer to that
is complicated and and I'm not sure anyone really has
the right one. Like I don't know if there is
a right answer. There are probably answers that have different
degrees of wrongness to them. Okay, we're gonna take another
(30:55):
quick break. When we come back we're going to talk
about the third of those big topics that fair phone
opens up, and that's repair ability. Now, anyone out there
who has had an issue with their electronics, if especially
(31:18):
if it's something like a smartphone, less so with computers,
because computers, if you know what you're doing, you can
frequently swap something out if something goes bad, like if
your motherboard goes bad. It might be hard for you
to to, you know, figure out that that's the problem,
but you can change out a motherboard, assuming you get
one that's compatible, that fits in your case and all
(31:40):
that kind of stuff. Same thing for a CPU or
a GPU or Ram, like all the different components. It's
fairly straightforward to swap them out and replace them. In
your standard desktop computer. Laptops are a different story. Those
get closer into the problems that I'm going to talk about.
When it comes to smartphones, it's very rare to come
(32:01):
across a smartphone where it's easy, or even potentially possible
for you to do a repair job yourself. That's because
smartphone companies take great efforts to one cram all the
components into as slim a form factor as possible, because
that scene as being a value to the industry. Like
(32:22):
you want to have a sleek, sexy, thin smartphone, so
that ends up causing part of the issue. You might
have to use glue, for example, to glue components into
place so that it can fit into this very small
form factor. Well, that makes it very difficult to access
and replace or repair that particular piece if it's been
(32:44):
glued to something else. Same thing with the actual case. Like,
I don't know about you, but my phone I wouldn't
be able to open it up to even access the internals.
In the first place. It's essentially sealed shut. You might
have to use something like a heat gun to weaken
the glue that's holding the case together, but then you
have to be super careful because if you you know,
(33:05):
if you overheat your smartphone, you might fry the various
components inside of it. You might need special pride bars
in order to be able to open it up. And
then once you get in and you look at the components,
some of them might be fastened to the the circuit
board or to the case itself using proprietary connectors, proprietary screws,
(33:29):
which means you need a special tool to be able
to unscrew them. Apple does this all the time, so
it makes things much more difficult to do repairs on
it's why? One of the reasons why is that companies
like apple really like to have a closed ecosystem. So
your device stops working, maybe you just end up buying
(33:50):
a new device. That would be great for Apple. They
would love that. But, failing that, maybe you have to
take that device into an apple store where someone, an
actual apple employee, will take the device off your hands
and the repairs will be done by licensed apple agents
who are doing all the work because they actually have
(34:10):
the tools to access all these different parts and they
have the individual parts as well, which, you know, most
companies don't sell those. Most companies don't sell you a
replacement for the various pieces that are inside the smartphone.
So it makes it very hard to repair these things.
Fair phone goes a different way. Fair phone takes a
more modular approach and it uses standard screws and it
(34:35):
doesn't glue stuff close. So you can open your fair
phone phone, you can remove the battery and swap it
out for a new one. Let's say that your battery
life has started to suffer, that the battery is starting
to to no longer hold as much of a charge
you can actually with a fair phone. Change the battery out,
put a new battery in Um and attach it screwed
(34:57):
back into place, and then you're good to go. And
maybe you send the old battery off to be recycled
so that way it can continue this process Um. In fact,
the fair phone, a couple of the fair phones, are
the first smartphone devices to receive a ten from I
fix it, which is a website that judges the repair
(35:18):
ability of various uh electronic devices, and the easier it
is to repair, the higher the score. Fair phone is
the only smartphone out there that's got a ten, and
that really shows you the approach of the company is
made saying we want to make sure that our device
will last you a long time, that if there is
(35:38):
a problem, you can solve it. Check out the beat
while the DJ revolves it, you just use the regular
tools to access it and swap it out. You can
actually buy the replacement components, you know. It's not like
it's hidden somewhere where. You know they have complete control
over supply chain that they don't allow anyone else to access.
So it really does change the game, and higherly as
(36:00):
far as reparability. This really falls in line with the
philosophy of the right to repair movement, and so it
is fundamentally different from the way most companies do their business,
where it's it's not as easy, it's not as convenient
and it takes away a revenue stream to allow people
to make repairs to their own stuff. Now there is
(36:21):
a massive trade off for all of these things that
fair phone does. You know the fact that fair phone
tries very hard to make sure that it is not
engaged in operations that contribute to human suffering, that it's
not working with companies that are exploiting workers by paying
(36:41):
them criminally low wages and making them work ridiculously long hours,
that it is a reparable device, that it's not something
that's going to put increased strain on the environment because
it's using more and more recycled materials. Two build these devices?
That trade off? Well, they're two. One is that it's
(37:03):
not nearly as advanced as your flagship smartphones on the market.
Right if you take the fair phone, for the most
recent one, and if you were to compare it to
an iphone fourteen, the most recent iphone, the iphone Fourteen's
specs blow the fair phone four out of the water.
There's no questions, not even close. Now, granted, the fair
(37:23):
phone four is cast is. It would cost around six
D seventy bucks us if they sold them in the US,
which they don't. But if we converted euro to two dollars,
would be around six D seventy bucks, whereas an IPHONE,
if you're getting a pro model, could be around a
thousand thousand two hundred bucks, somewhere around there, depending on
which model you're getting. So yes, less expensive than an IPHONE,
(37:46):
but also far less powerful. If you actually compare the
fair phone four against other smartphones that have a comparable
set of capabilities, then the other phones cost, you know,
half as much, or us like you might find a
phone that costs a hundred, fifty or two hundred dollars
that has the equivalent specs of the fair phone four,
(38:07):
which costs six. That really shows you that if you
want to go about things in an ethically responsible manner,
there is a massive cost to that. It does cost
a lot more money. It also really pulls back the
curtain on how much money, quote unquote, you're saving by
(38:28):
depending upon these systems that bring along with it these
awful conditions for the people who are are in these operations.
So you start asking yourself questions. Is it more valuable
to you to be able to say the devices I use,
I'm going to use them for as long as I
possibly can and I want to make sure that they
(38:49):
are ethically sourced and I don't mind paying more for them?
Not everyone has that capability to I mean, I fully
understand like there are a lot of consumers out there
where paying more for the stuff they need is just
not an option, particularly as we are on the brink
of whatever economic calamity we're in right now, whether it's
a recession or not. It's tough. Is a tough ask
(39:11):
to go to someone and say hey, that device you
want and or need is dependent upon unethical practices, so
you need to pay more money for this thing that
does less so that you're not contributing to human misery,
and the other person says, I can't afford to do that.
(39:34):
I mean, that's that's a tough argument to to go against. Right.
So there are no easy solutions here, but being aware
of the problem, I think, is absolutely important, like having
that that knowledge of how this system works and what
it is dependent upon is an important component because it
might make you pause when you are about to purchase
(39:57):
your next electronic gadget, to ask questions about this and
to potentially hold companies accountable and to demand changes for
people who aren't in a position to be able to
argue for themselves. And I think ultimately that's the right
thing to do. But it is, you know, a long game.
It's very hard and it will come with the cost
(40:21):
of things being more expensive over time. So it's not
something that I think would ever happen immediately. I'll be
amazed if it happens at all. But but I feel
like it's something that we need to talk about to
be able to at least acknowledge what's going on. To
turn a blind eye to it and to pretend like
these things aren't happening, I think is a massive injustice
(40:44):
and I think we have to reckon with it. And
I realized that the reason why a lot of this
stuff never really makes the news that frequently is that
it's happening in places that are so far away from us,
especially I'm talking about here in the United States in particular.
It's so far away from where we are that it's
easy for us to just not think about it and
(41:06):
not pay attention, because that might as well be a
different world to a lot of us, and so it's
so far away and the people are people we don't
know and we have no connection to that it's easier
for us to kind of shrug and set it aside
and then go after the next shiny thing. But yeah,
(41:27):
I love the fair phone for mission because, or the
fair phone mission, I should say, just the whole company's
mission because, like I said, it really does try to
address some massive issues in the technology space, the hardware space,
and I think that's commendable. Whether the device is one
(41:48):
worth getting or not, I can't say they don't sell
them in the US. I have never held one in
my hand, but I think the mission is one that
I really believe in and I would like to see
that kind of extend over time and an effort be
made to create a more humane and environmentally conscious approach
(42:13):
toward producing our electronics, even if that means they're going
to cost a bit more. All right, I know I
rambled a lot and I went off on these things
and maybe you have a fundamentally different point of view
about this. Now. Maybe there are economic factors that you
would argue for that. Again, it's hard to argue against them. If,
(42:36):
if you argue this literally is the only way it
can work, because if it went any other way, the
companies would go to a business, then we're in another
we're in another crisis. It's just a different kind of one.
But that's my own point of view. If you have
things that you would like me to talk about in
future episodes of tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology,
(42:57):
trend in tech, a personality and technology, anything like that,
let me know. One Way to do that is to
download the I heart radio APP, which is free to
download and use, and you can navigate over to tech
stuff just, you know, put text stuff in the little
search field. It'll pop up you. Once you're over on
tech stuff, you'll see that there's a little microphone icon.
If you click on that, you can leave a voice
(43:18):
message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know
what you would like me to talk about, or you
can always leave me a message on twitter. The handle
for the show is tech stuff, hs W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text stuff is an
(43:39):
I heart radio production. For more podcasts from my heart radio,
visit the I heart radio, APP apple podcasts or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech stuff, a production from I heart radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I heart radio,
and how the Tech Are you? Recently I was invited
to speak on the radio about the fair phone four,
(00:24):
which is the latest smartphone from fair phone, and in
the process I realized that this company and this line
of products really opens up the opportunity to talk about
a lot of serious issues in tech, issues that the
fair phone looks to try and avoid and to bring
attention to. So these are issues like the ethical sourcing
(00:47):
of materials and labor, sustainability and e waste and also
repair ability. So I figured today we're gonna talk about
the fair phone four only a little bit, and how
it opens the door to talk about these issues in
tech and why they're important and why they're really complicated.
And I could have started, you know, anywhere, but I
(01:08):
decided to tackle those in order that I mentioned them.
So I'M gonna start off with ethical sourcing. It is
very easy for us to be reductive in our thinking
when we look at any particular electronic device. Consider your
typical smartphone. In fact, let's be specific. Let's say that
we're talking about an iphone. Now I'm going to add
(01:28):
that apple has, on and off, done some serious work
to try and make ethical choices when it comes to
the manufacturing of its devices, particularly in the wake of
scrutiny that was directed toward apple because there were some
very high profile tragedies, like worker depths in China related
to apple production. Um, the company has not maintained a
(01:54):
stellar record like I'll talk about a bit more later,
but anyway, apple at least has been in the public
eye for this issue and when you look at an Iphone,
you might think, oh well, this just this came from apple,
but of course the truth of the matter is that
it gets far more complex than that. I think there's
a great way to kind of illustrate this. There's a
(02:16):
song that's called the guns song and it comes from
Stephen Sondheim's musical assassins. The musical is about the various
people who assassinated or attempted to assassinate a U S
president over the course of the history of the United States. Now,
the character singing this part of the guns song in
(02:36):
question is Leon Frank Chol Gas, who assassinated President Mckinley
on September six, N one and Chol Gas sings. Quote.
It takes a lot of men to make a gun.
Hundreds many men to make a gun. Men in the
minds to dig the iron, men in the mills to
forge the steel, minute machines to turn the barrel, mold
(02:59):
the trigger, shape the wheel. It takes a lot of
men to make a gun. One Gun. End. Quote, and
Hill Gods is right. He's pointing out that this one
thing that someone can hold and they can own and
they can use is actually the product of work from
hundreds of people. Also, at the end of the song
(03:19):
he makes it a point to say that this production,
this manufacturing process, can cost many lives before the gun
is ever fired. In other words, this gun effectively killed
people even though it hadn't even been fully built yet,
because people had died in the making of it. Well,
the same thing, tragically, is true with our electronics. Our
(03:42):
devices don't magically come out of a big building that
has computer factory or smartphone manufacturing facility on the side.
Our electronics are the product of many, many steps in
a complicated and interconnected supply chain. We saw how dangerous
the supply chain can be when it was disrupted and
(04:03):
continues to be disrupted in the wake of the pandemic,
and it brought a lot more attention to it, but
it's attention more to how it inconveniences us or how
it affects businesses less so about the conditions going on
at various points of the supply chain. And there are
many points in that chain where there are big, troubling problems.
(04:28):
Let's start with raw materials. So our devices rely on
some materials that we think of as being pretty scarce.
We call them rare earth elements. Sometimes you will hear
rare earth minerals or rare earth metals. We frequently will
say rare earth elements just to kind of lump them
all into one category. Now, that's a bit of a misnomer. Actually,
(04:53):
they're not that rare. It's just it's very hard to
find a lot of those material eels in a single place. Uh,
it's that you know, you you don't find veins of
ore of these rare earth elements. You can't just dig
and say, Oh, I found a vein of whatever. So
(05:15):
instead what you have to do is gather up huge
clumps of earth and stone, minerals, and you have to
treat it so that you can separate the rare earth
elements from that Earth. So you've got to displace a ton,
literally literally tons, of earth and then treat it in
(05:36):
order to get at the stuff that we need in
order to have them incorporated into our electronics and make
them work. Now, if we were lied on places in
the world that maintained strict controls when it comes to
how you can treat workers and how you protect the
environment in the process of your operations, that amount of
(06:00):
effort and attention would end up translating into higher costs
and manufacturing. So, for example, we might identify a region
in the United States that could be ideal for mining
certain rare earth elements that we would use for electronics.
But if we did that, any operation would have to
(06:21):
follow these strict rules, because that's the law in the
United States, and those rules would cover stuff like the
environmental impact of the operations. A lot of mining operations
use explosives to blast out deep pits and they also
tend to rely on enormous pools filled with toxic chemicals,
and those chemicals leach out the stuff you want from
(06:44):
everything else and then you dump everything else into a
waste pit, or sometimes you might just have the toxic
pool become the waste pit over time. So you essentially
create enormous amounts of soil and rocks that you dump
into these toxic pools. You let the chemicals do their
work and extract the stuff that's in these teeny tiny
(07:07):
concentrations within this massive earth and then you generate an
enormous amount of spoil and this is the product of
your mining. Now that toxic pool is obviously hazardous for
the environment. We're talking about chemicals that can cause direct
harm if you're exposed to them, or long term harm
(07:27):
if it gets into things like the water supply. It's
also obviously hazardous for the people who are working at
these operations. Now a lot of this particular kind of
work happens in China, which has a terrible human rights record.
There is a mine in the Mongolia region of China
where more than of all the rare earth elements mind
(07:48):
in the country comes from. So out of all of China,
one mind accounts for more than of all rare earth
elements taken out of that country. It's called the by
an oboe mine. It represents more than the total known
earth rare earth elements in the world and almost half
(08:09):
of all the rare earth elements that we need come
from this one mine. It's been an operation as a
rare earth elements mine since nine before that it was
an iron mine. Anyway, this extraction process leaves behind lots
of waste. There's toxic wastewater which is filled with stuff
like heavy metals and radioactive materials and other dangerous stuff.
(08:33):
If that water does get into the water supply, then
you're looking at a really hazardous situation for all the
people within that region who access that water table. It's
not unusual in areas around these kinds of operations to
see an increase in cancer rates for the populations in
that region. Uh, it is possible to mine rare earth
(08:56):
elements more responsibly, but that takes more time, takes more effort.
Thus it's more expensive, and so you have to first
work in a place that takes these things seriously. China
is not one of those places and a place that
doesn't treat workers as expendable. And for the record, there
are rare earth element reserves in other parts of the world,
(09:17):
like the United States, really does have some rare earth
element deposits, but because of those strict rules about limiting
environmental damage and mitigating the risk to human populations, including
the workforce, you don't see them. Those operations happen because
it would be way more expensive. That would either cut
into the profits of the electronics companies or, more likely,
(09:40):
result in an increase price to the consumer, or maybe
both of those things. Anyway, that's just one part of
the supply chain, the mining process that has a dark side.
And there are other mining operations that also have a
truly disturbing dark side. One of those happens in Africa,
(10:02):
specifically in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the
D R C, and Y'all, I'm gonna warn you this
gets grim now. The first thing you have to understand
is that the D R C has had an incredibly
violent and chaotic past due to things like colonialism, civil war,
(10:23):
war in nearby nations, rampant government corruption and even more
rampant exploitation of the natives of the region, and I
do think it's important to understand at least a very
quick history of the D R C to get a
context for, as you know, as far as how the
rest of the world helps perpetuate an ongoing crisis within
(10:46):
this country. So let's get a quick rundown of its history,
and I stress this is the barest bones. I am
not doing any justice to the Democratic Republic of the
Congo with this quick history, but I to kind of
paint a picture of the plight of the people in
this in this country. So much has happened there, but
(11:07):
generally speaking, the native peoples of the Democratic Republic of
the Congo have been the subject of abuse and exploitation
for about a hundred fifty years. At first it was
King Leopold of Belgium. He claimed the entire region as
his own personal property and he sent agents there to
oversee operations that forced locals to work in the rubber
(11:31):
trade or they risked losing life and limb. Literally, there
was a practice for a while where if someone was
resisting the authority of the king, that person might get
their arm lopped off, absolutely brutal. Then in the early
twentieth century, under intense international pressure, King Leopold would hand
(11:55):
over the control of the region to the Belgian parliament.
This is where the region became known as the Belgian Congo,
and at that point very large companies mostly Belgian companies
replaced Leopold's agents, but the people of the region were
still oppressed and exploited. It's just now they were exploited
(12:16):
by these companies as opposed to the king's representatives. Over time,
folks discovered there were other valuable resources besides rubber in
the region that would eventually become the D R c.
There was copper, for example. Later on they discovered uranium there.
So as the atomic age advanced, countries like the then
(12:39):
Soviet Union and the United States became very interested in
the region, and both the USSR and the USA, as
well as several other first world nations, would start to
interfere in the region. Some sides would shore up rebel
forces UH and some sides would shore up dictators. The
(13:00):
United States supported dictators because the so union was funding
rebel forces, and it was all in an effort to
secure access to those resources. You don't kid yourself in
thinking that either the USSR or the United States were
really concerned for the people in the region. They were
concerned for those resources and they would take whatever means
(13:22):
necessary in order to make sure the other side couldn't
get it. Meanwhile, the people of the nation continued to
Labor under inhumane conditions. Now the region gained independence in
nineteen sixty because Belgium realized that it was not going
to be able to keep a lid on things much longer.
There was a growing sense of independence in the country.
Belgium did not have the resources to be able to
(13:45):
suppress that, so there was a move to become a democratic,
independent nation in nineteen sixty. But this opened up opportunities
for other countries to try and install leaders within the
Congo that would be more in client to trade with
one side versus the other, uh and ultimately it gave
(14:05):
a man named Mobutu the chance to declare himself president
of the country in nineteen sixty five. Mobutu was incredibly corrupt.
You could say he was using a lot of the
same tactics as King Leopold and those large companies from
decades earlier, and he was embezzling tons of money in
order to fund his own private wealth. Things would get
(14:27):
even more complicated over the following decades. By the nineteen nineties,
there was a civil war in neighboring Rwanda and a
genocide in Rwanda, and that ended up leading to conflict
in what would be the D R C at this
point in history. It was not the DRC yet. They
had gone from the Belgian Congo to becoming the Republic
of Zaire under Mobutu. And you know, Mo Bout was
(14:51):
essentially a dictator who was calling himself a president, someone
who was running unopposed an election after election, and the
incredible pressure from the civil war forced him to flee
the nation. But things did not necessarily get better from there.
I'll talk about it more when we come back after
this quick break. We're back, all right. We left off
(15:22):
with Mobutu fleeing what was then called the Republic of Zaire,
and the new leaders of the Congo renamed it the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. So that's where we get
its current name. This is a nation that has gone
under many names over its history, but the corruption within
the region at all levels of government and business, ran
(15:46):
super deep. It's not like everything magically got better once
Mobu too was deposed, essentially. And there were pockets in
the DRC where military rebels were relying on forced labor
are including child labor, to mine for materials like copper
and then later cobalt. Cobalt is incredibly useful in electronics.
(16:09):
That's where we're really going to focus for the rest
of this conversation. So the armed rebels would sell these
raw materials to buyers, essentially manufacturing companies, and then they
would use the money they made from selling the raw
materials to buy weapons and to try and gain more
control over their various territories. All right, it gets worse.
(16:33):
The fact that the D R C sits on top
of deposits of valuable resources means that there's an ongoing
pressure from the rest of the world to get access
to those raw materials way of the list. On of
those nations is China. In fact, there are a handful
of Chinese mining companies that have exclusive rights to specific
areas within the DRC to mine for cobalt in particular. So,
(16:56):
like I said, cobalts used in a lot of stuff,
including many types of lithium batteries, and our electronics rely
on batteries. We know that there's an increased dependence upon batteries.
In fact, if we want to have a future where
electric vehicles replace internal combustion engine vehicles, we're gonna need
a lot more batteries. So you've got these areas within
(17:18):
the D R C where Chinese companies are overseeing dangerous
mining operations and effectively are in control of those regions
within the D R C. Like you have Chinese companies
that are essentially ruling parts of the Democratic Republic of
the Congo. So you've also got these impoverished communities within
(17:40):
the D R C that are attempting to get at
least a little autonomy to be able to profit from
their own resources. People who live on land and that
they discover that they have cobalt on their land, they
often find themselves forced off and incapable of profiting off
their own property. This can actually escalate in to brutal
(18:00):
confrontations with armed police and military. There's a twenty one
piece in the New Yorker that's titled the Dark Side
of Congo's cobalt rush and I urge you to read it. Uh,
the piece goes into a lot more detail on the
stuff I'm talking about, but essentially, the people of the
D R C have had very little agency for multiple generations.
(18:24):
There are entire towns that have been uprooted and forced
to move, with people scattering all over the place as
a Chinese mining operation has swooped in to demolish houses
and turn what was once a town into just a
bunch of minds. And there's a lack of safety precautions
in these mining operations, which means the actual people doing
(18:46):
the mining, many of them children, face life threatening situations regularly,
and the presence of armed police and military, who are
essentially paid off by the Chinese to keep things in line,
will often mean that you run the risk of being
beaten for any kind of resistance to the normal process
of operations. And, like I said, there's this ongoing issue
(19:08):
of child labor in the region. It's something that has
gained global attention and occasionally you see companies do something
about it, like Apple. Apple has now and again attempted
to address this problem, though the article in The New
Yorker specifically alleges that apple pretty much abandoned any attempts
(19:29):
to be serious about that once the heat was off
the company. So you know, they made an effort for
a while and then, when people stop paying attention, they
just went back to the old old way. So the
human cost is very high. And keep in mind so
far we're only talking about raw materials. Let's also talk
about the manufacturing process. See, when we move up the
(19:51):
supply chain, then we have to talk about taking raw
materials and turning them into components that will later get
assembled into finished products. Now, some of these steps happen
in places where things aren't too rough, but ultimately it
all goes back to places like China. While your major
tech companies aren't reliant upon mainland China for microprocessors, because
(20:13):
that honor tends to go to Taiwan. Taiwan is off
the coast of China and it is independent of the mainland,
though mainland China disputes that point. But you know, if
you're talking about assembly and packaging, then that's all out
of China. In fact, these processes usually take place in
different facilities hundreds or thousands of miles apart. So you're
(20:35):
shipping stuff all over Asia just for it to become
a finished product. You know, it kind of gets back
to that song from assassins it takes a lot of
men to make a gun. In this case, your iphone
has traveled the world in some ways before it ever
got to you. Anyway, according to researchers like Henry Young
(20:56):
of the National University of Singapore, more than half of
the world's electronics are at some point going through a
process of manufacturing within China, and the country has a
reputation for very harsh working conditions, which includes unreasonable punishments
for even minor offenses. And it was so bad that
(21:17):
the economic rights institute looked into more than a hundred
fifty cases between ten and which workers at these kinds
of facilities committed or attempted to commit suicide. The researchers
found that low wages, anxiety over job security, a massive
turnover problem and harsh punishments, as well as a feeling
(21:40):
that no one in the managerial capacity ever even gave
a crap about them, all contributed to folks having such
despondents that they considered suicide. Now this became global news
when there were actually a string of suicides, more than
a dozen of them, and a manufacturing company called Fox
(22:00):
con in and sadly, the reason the world really took
notice is because Fox con is one of Apple's big suppliers.
It's part of Apple's supply chain. If it hadn't been
for that connection to apple, I would wager that those
depths would not have received much coverage outside of China.
Probably not that much inside of China, and that is
(22:24):
absolutely unthinkable to me, but it's the it's the truth. Now,
over the last decade, wages for workers in these facilities
has slowly improved. The low wages have gotten better over
the last several years, which has raised the cost of
doing business in China. So it's a little more expensive
to have your manufacturing processes operate in China because they're
(22:46):
paying people more, but because China has such a well
developed manufacturing infrastructure means it's still the main choice over
alternatives like Vietnam and India, where you know the Labor
could be a lot cheaper. Again, you get into real
problems with all this. But the reason why companies aren't
(23:07):
necessarily flocking to Vietnam and India for all of their manufacturing.
Some of them are dipping their toe in that, but
the reason they're not rushing to it is that these
these countries have a lack of infrastructure when you compare
it to China. So there's this kind of balancing act
that companies are doing, saying well, well, well, we'll continue
(23:28):
to operate in China while we start to see manufacturing
infrastructure built out in other nations where we might be
able to exploit cheaper labor so that our our costs
come down. But yeah, that's the main reason that the
world turned to China in the first place. It's because
the labor costs were so low that it kept the
overall cost of manufacturing down, and thus it could mean that,
(23:52):
you know, the consumer sees less expensive electronics. You know,
they might still be pricey, but they're not as expensive
as they would be if, you know, we were being
better stewards of the environment and treating people as human beings. So, yeah,
it comes at the cost of a lot of lives
along the way. Financially it might cost less, but the
social cost is and the environmental cost is very high.
(24:15):
All right, that's enough. I know that I get on
a soapbox and it sounds like I'm preaching. We're gonna
switch our thoughts over to sustainability and recycling. Still gonna
be a little preachy. Apologized for that. It's just the
way it works. So, as we've already covered, getting the
raw materials for our electronics includes a lot of practices
that are harmful not just to humans but also the environment.
(24:36):
And meanwhile the Electronics Industry is built upon a practice
of consume and replace. By that I mean we in
the developed world our condition to replace our stuff on
a regular basis. Um computers are they tend to last
five to eight years if you've taken good care of them.
(24:57):
That's assuming you don't need to upgrade to a more
recent system. You know, frequently, like if you're a pro
Gamer or something, you might be upgrading your system until
the motherboard can't support anymore and then you swap it
all out, and so you might be changing your rig
fairly regularly. People like me, where I'm using a work
computer to do some pretty light work, I can get
(25:20):
away with using the same machine for several years in
a row. But then with smartphones there's this push to
upgrade every two years or less. You know, we get
new models with new features every single year and they're
marketed to us as being a big improvement over the
stuff that came out the year before. The old contract
systems that were with carriers here in the United States
(25:42):
meant that you used to have the chance to renew
your agreement, your agreement with whatever carrier you use, every
two years and you would get a phone for a
highly subsidized price. So the actual cost of the phone
could be lower, even free, depending upon the plan. That's
not as common these days. We don't see those subsidized
phones as frequently in the United States as we used to,
(26:05):
but it got people into the habit of thinking every
two years or so that they needed a new phone.
Some people it's even more frequently. They they want to
get the newest model as soon as it comes out.
But then what happens to all the old phones and computers?
Like we've created this culture where we have manufactured the
(26:26):
desire for new products. Well, the old products have to
go somewhere. Right. Where do we put them? You know,
you shouldn't just throw them away, although a lot of
people do. Uh. For one thing, you might have some
important information stored on there somewhere and you really need
to make sure you've gone through and thoroughly, uh, formatted
and deleted all that stuff so that someone doesn't come
(26:49):
into possession of one of your old pieces of equipment
and get access to information they should not be able
to access. But for another thing, if the electronics still works,
like if you have a smartphone you want to upgrade
but your old smartphone still works. Well, you could donate
your old smartphone to an organization that can make sure
that someone who otherwise would not have that kind of
(27:12):
a device can get it. If it's a device that
doesn't work, it still contains valuable and, in some cases,
toxic materials in it, and you know you don't want
the toxic stuff to go into a landfill where it
might leach out and contaminate the environment. That's obviously something
that no one wants to have happened. And you don't
(27:34):
want to waste the valuable stuff that's in your electronics either.
Right like there's stuff in there that could be used again,
even if the device itself is shot. There are components, there's,
you know, copper, there's even gold. There are other things
that are dangerous stuff too, like mercury and lead. So
you don't go cracking into your old electronics hoping that
(27:55):
you're gonna be panning for gold in them, but it
would be a great idea to risk cycle the electronics
in those cases in order to reclaim those valuable materials
and use them again instead of them just going into
a landfill. Now I will caution you, because the recycling
process is also a complicated one. We've talked about it
(28:15):
on this show before. There are some electronics recycling companies
that just gather up enormous amounts of electronics. They pack
cargo containers full of them, they ship them overseas, often
to places like China, and the recycling operations, the reclamation operations,
(28:37):
are actually very similar to how rare earth element minds
end up separating the materials from Earth in the first place.
They often rely on caustic, toxic chemicals to leach that
stuff out of the electronics and thus be able to
reclaim it, and those operations can put workers at risk.
(29:01):
There are entire towns in China that became dangerous to
live in due to the chemicals that were being used
to pull valuable stuff out of old electronics. So even
when you're trying to do the responsible thing with your
old devices and recycle them, you can inadvertently participate in
a system that exploits people and causes harm. There are
(29:24):
ethical electronics recycling programs out there, but it takes some
legwork to find them. Once you do, those old electronics
can be processed and materials can be reclaimed to be
used in future products. That's what the Fair Phone Company
strives to do. So rather than source materials that come
from places like the D R C, where it's far
(29:46):
more likely that they came out of an operation that
has a terrible disregard for the safety of its workforce.
The stuff is coming from old electronics that no longer
have a use. They're relying heavily on recycled materials in
order to get access to those, those raw components. Now,
reducing our reliance on new material boost sustainability and that's
(30:08):
a huge benefit in the long run, at least on
the environmental side. On the humanitarian side, things get awfully complicated,
because what do you do about taking jobs away, like
if you if you remove the demand for cobalt within
the D R C and these Chinese companies all pull
up stakes, what takes its place? Because you you have
(30:31):
a region that has been unstable for generations, largely due
to interference from other countries, and the answer to that
is complicated and and I'm not sure anyone really has
the right one. Like I don't know if there is
a right answer. There are probably answers that have different
degrees of wrongness to them. Okay, we're gonna take another
(30:55):
quick break. When we come back we're going to talk
about the third of those big topics that fair phone
opens up, and that's repair ability. Now, anyone out there
who has had an issue with their electronics, if especially
(31:18):
if it's something like a smartphone, less so with computers,
because computers, if you know what you're doing, you can
frequently swap something out if something goes bad, like if
your motherboard goes bad. It might be hard for you
to to, you know, figure out that that's the problem,
but you can change out a motherboard, assuming you get
one that's compatible, that fits in your case and all
(31:40):
that kind of stuff. Same thing for a CPU or
a GPU or Ram, like all the different components. It's
fairly straightforward to swap them out and replace them. In
your standard desktop computer. Laptops are a different story. Those
get closer into the problems that I'm going to talk about.
When it comes to smartphones, it's very rare to come
(32:01):
across a smartphone where it's easy, or even potentially possible
for you to do a repair job yourself. That's because
smartphone companies take great efforts to one cram all the
components into as slim a form factor as possible, because
that scene as being a value to the industry. Like
(32:22):
you want to have a sleek, sexy, thin smartphone, so
that ends up causing part of the issue. You might
have to use glue, for example, to glue components into
place so that it can fit into this very small
form factor. Well, that makes it very difficult to access
and replace or repair that particular piece if it's been
(32:44):
glued to something else. Same thing with the actual case. Like,
I don't know about you, but my phone I wouldn't
be able to open it up to even access the internals.
In the first place. It's essentially sealed shut. You might
have to use something like a heat gun to weaken
the glue that's holding the case together, but then you
have to be super careful because if you you know,
(33:05):
if you overheat your smartphone, you might fry the various
components inside of it. You might need special pride bars
in order to be able to open it up. And
then once you get in and you look at the components,
some of them might be fastened to the the circuit
board or to the case itself using proprietary connectors, proprietary screws,
(33:29):
which means you need a special tool to be able
to unscrew them. Apple does this all the time, so
it makes things much more difficult to do repairs on
it's why? One of the reasons why is that companies
like apple really like to have a closed ecosystem. So
your device stops working, maybe you just end up buying
(33:50):
a new device. That would be great for Apple. They
would love that. But, failing that, maybe you have to
take that device into an apple store where someone, an
actual apple employee, will take the device off your hands
and the repairs will be done by licensed apple agents
who are doing all the work because they actually have
(34:10):
the tools to access all these different parts and they
have the individual parts as well, which, you know, most
companies don't sell those. Most companies don't sell you a
replacement for the various pieces that are inside the smartphone.
So it makes it very hard to repair these things.
Fair phone goes a different way. Fair phone takes a
more modular approach and it uses standard screws and it
(34:35):
doesn't glue stuff close. So you can open your fair
phone phone, you can remove the battery and swap it
out for a new one. Let's say that your battery
life has started to suffer, that the battery is starting
to to no longer hold as much of a charge
you can actually with a fair phone. Change the battery out,
put a new battery in Um and attach it screwed
(34:57):
back into place, and then you're good to go. And
maybe you send the old battery off to be recycled
so that way it can continue this process Um. In fact,
the fair phone, a couple of the fair phones, are
the first smartphone devices to receive a ten from I
fix it, which is a website that judges the repair
(35:18):
ability of various uh electronic devices, and the easier it
is to repair, the higher the score. Fair phone is
the only smartphone out there that's got a ten, and
that really shows you the approach of the company is
made saying we want to make sure that our device
will last you a long time, that if there is
(35:38):
a problem, you can solve it. Check out the beat
while the DJ revolves it, you just use the regular
tools to access it and swap it out. You can
actually buy the replacement components, you know. It's not like
it's hidden somewhere where. You know they have complete control
over supply chain that they don't allow anyone else to access.
So it really does change the game, and higherly as
(36:00):
far as reparability. This really falls in line with the
philosophy of the right to repair movement, and so it
is fundamentally different from the way most companies do their business,
where it's it's not as easy, it's not as convenient
and it takes away a revenue stream to allow people
to make repairs to their own stuff. Now there is
(36:21):
a massive trade off for all of these things that
fair phone does. You know the fact that fair phone
tries very hard to make sure that it is not
engaged in operations that contribute to human suffering, that it's
not working with companies that are exploiting workers by paying
(36:41):
them criminally low wages and making them work ridiculously long hours,
that it is a reparable device, that it's not something
that's going to put increased strain on the environment because
it's using more and more recycled materials. Two build these devices?
That trade off? Well, they're two. One is that it's
(37:03):
not nearly as advanced as your flagship smartphones on the market.
Right if you take the fair phone, for the most
recent one, and if you were to compare it to
an iphone fourteen, the most recent iphone, the iphone Fourteen's
specs blow the fair phone four out of the water.
There's no questions, not even close. Now, granted, the fair
(37:23):
phone four is cast is. It would cost around six
D seventy bucks us if they sold them in the US,
which they don't. But if we converted euro to two dollars,
would be around six D seventy bucks, whereas an IPHONE,
if you're getting a pro model, could be around a
thousand thousand two hundred bucks, somewhere around there, depending on
which model you're getting. So yes, less expensive than an IPHONE,
(37:46):
but also far less powerful. If you actually compare the
fair phone four against other smartphones that have a comparable
set of capabilities, then the other phones cost, you know,
half as much, or us like you might find a
phone that costs a hundred, fifty or two hundred dollars
that has the equivalent specs of the fair phone four,
(38:07):
which costs six. That really shows you that if you
want to go about things in an ethically responsible manner,
there is a massive cost to that. It does cost
a lot more money. It also really pulls back the
curtain on how much money, quote unquote, you're saving by
(38:28):
depending upon these systems that bring along with it these
awful conditions for the people who are are in these operations.
So you start asking yourself questions. Is it more valuable
to you to be able to say the devices I use,
I'm going to use them for as long as I
possibly can and I want to make sure that they
(38:49):
are ethically sourced and I don't mind paying more for them?
Not everyone has that capability to I mean, I fully
understand like there are a lot of consumers out there
where paying more for the stuff they need is just
not an option, particularly as we are on the brink
of whatever economic calamity we're in right now, whether it's
a recession or not. It's tough. Is a tough ask
(39:11):
to go to someone and say hey, that device you
want and or need is dependent upon unethical practices, so
you need to pay more money for this thing that
does less so that you're not contributing to human misery,
and the other person says, I can't afford to do that.
(39:34):
I mean, that's that's a tough argument to to go against. Right.
So there are no easy solutions here, but being aware
of the problem, I think, is absolutely important, like having
that that knowledge of how this system works and what
it is dependent upon is an important component because it
might make you pause when you are about to purchase
(39:57):
your next electronic gadget, to ask questions about this and
to potentially hold companies accountable and to demand changes for
people who aren't in a position to be able to
argue for themselves. And I think ultimately that's the right
thing to do. But it is, you know, a long game.
It's very hard and it will come with the cost
(40:21):
of things being more expensive over time. So it's not
something that I think would ever happen immediately. I'll be
amazed if it happens at all. But but I feel
like it's something that we need to talk about to
be able to at least acknowledge what's going on. To
turn a blind eye to it and to pretend like
these things aren't happening, I think is a massive injustice
(40:44):
and I think we have to reckon with it. And
I realized that the reason why a lot of this
stuff never really makes the news that frequently is that
it's happening in places that are so far away from us,
especially I'm talking about here in the United States in particular.
It's so far away from where we are that it's
easy for us to just not think about it and
(41:06):
not pay attention, because that might as well be a
different world to a lot of us, and so it's
so far away and the people are people we don't
know and we have no connection to that it's easier
for us to kind of shrug and set it aside
and then go after the next shiny thing. But yeah,
(41:27):
I love the fair phone for mission because, or the
fair phone mission, I should say, just the whole company's
mission because, like I said, it really does try to
address some massive issues in the technology space, the hardware space,
and I think that's commendable. Whether the device is one
(41:48):
worth getting or not, I can't say they don't sell
them in the US. I have never held one in
my hand, but I think the mission is one that
I really believe in and I would like to see
that kind of extend over time and an effort be
made to create a more humane and environmentally conscious approach
(42:13):
toward producing our electronics, even if that means they're going
to cost a bit more. All right, I know I
rambled a lot and I went off on these things
and maybe you have a fundamentally different point of view
about this. Now. Maybe there are economic factors that you
would argue for that. Again, it's hard to argue against them. If,
(42:36):
if you argue this literally is the only way it
can work, because if it went any other way, the
companies would go to a business, then we're in another
we're in another crisis. It's just a different kind of one.
But that's my own point of view. If you have
things that you would like me to talk about in
future episodes of tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology,
(42:57):
trend in tech, a personality and technology, anything like that,
let me know. One Way to do that is to
download the I heart radio APP, which is free to
download and use, and you can navigate over to tech
stuff just, you know, put text stuff in the little
search field. It'll pop up you. Once you're over on
tech stuff, you'll see that there's a little microphone icon.
If you click on that, you can leave a voice
(43:18):
message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know
what you would like me to talk about, or you
can always leave me a message on twitter. The handle
for the show is tech stuff, hs W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text stuff is an
(43:39):
I heart radio production. For more podcasts from my heart radio,
visit the I heart radio, APP apple podcasts or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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