Secret Genius of Modern Life Smart Phone Interactive

What's happening to old tech?

How long can this continue?

Where do we go next?

How did we get here?

References

What's happening to our old tech?

Find out what Professor Hannah Fry did with her old mobile phone

Next, let's take a deeper dive into the data from the other 55 million smartphone users in the UK...

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Vital Statistics

UK Smartphone Users

While we love an upgrade, many of us don't like saying goodbye to our old devices! Explore some of the reasons we're so attached to our tech below...

What happened to your old mobile phone?

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Why did you keep it?

Smartphone use in the UK has increased hugely in the past 15 years - explore the numbers...

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How did we get here?

Find out what makes us upgrade: is it new features, or did we drop the old one?

You might be surprised to learn that you yourself may not know what makes you want a new phone!

Next, we'll explore the multiple factors that influence our buying habits more than we realise.

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Over consumption?

An insatiable appetite

Now, manufacturers, designers and advertisers have to find ways to keep up with increasing consumption and with rising demand...

A new(er) normal

As newer materials and manufacturing methods are discovered, efficiency also improves, leading to growth... but what comes next?

EXPLORE

We weren't always like this...

EXPLORE

Throughout history, people have usually had to make use of what resources and energy were available within a relatively close proximity...

EXPLORE

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How long can this continue?

Find out about the chemical elements that go into making our mobile phones

Next, we'll look at how many of the 118 known chemical elements go into making a mobile phone, where they're found and, crucially, if they'll run out.

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The nuts and bolts

What's in a Smartphone?

Scientists at the University of Plymouth blended mobile phones into a powder to find out...

Out of Our Element(s)?

LOOK INSIDE

Blend it!

The elements that go into a smartphone are finite resources, which have to be mined from the ground, processed and then refined to get them in to a usable form. Satisfying the ever-increasing demand for these elements has ethical and environmental implications...

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Where do we go next?

Professor Hannah Fry explains how design changes could impact sustainability

On the next page, we'll look at why we need to change our relationship with products if we hope to meet sustainability targets - moving away from over-consumption through upgrades and planned obsolescence, or "affluenza".

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5 steps towards a more sustainable future

A better relationship with products

Designing for longevity and repair

Having simpler, better products

Design for better end-of-life

Design better services and systems

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Sources Used in the Interactive

Vital Statistics

• United Kingdom (UK): number of smartphone users 2019-2028 | Statista
• Mobile phone and internet usage statistics in the UK (finder.com)
• UK Mobile Phone Statistics 2023 - Mobiles Facts and Stats Report (uswitch.com)
• 45% of smartphone owners would rather upgrade than repair | YouGov
• Digital Consumer Trends 2022 - Smartphones | Deloitte UK

Over Comsumption?

• De Graaf, J., Wann, D. and Naylor, T. H. (2002) Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, Berett-Koehler Publishers.

5 Steps Towards a More Sustainable Future

• IEA Website, Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks

An insatiable appetite

One of the worst side effects of mass consumption is the ways in which manufacturers increase consumption artificially and deliberately, for example through planned obsolescence, where products are designed and manufactured that: break easily; are hard to repair; have expensive consumables; are deliberately fashionable; or offer only small incremental changes. This all depends on people being consumers, not just users of products, and this has changed how we relate to the tech and products we use. Ongoing consumption has even been likened to a disease in itself: affluenza . It is only very recently that some of these issues have been addressed by legislation in the UK. Designers have always been experts at

creating new products, whether we want them or not. But design also has a lot of potential to fix some of these problems, too. To change unsustainable economic and production structures, we will need new ideas, new business models and new ways of thinking about how we use energy and resources.

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Design better services and systems

Your phone is always on, always sending and receiving data. This has an energy impact – not only from charging the battery but also on the other end of the transaction: the infrastructure and servers running the services on your phone (and the adverts!). To get a sense of scale here, the energy used in global data centres last year was about the same as the total energy use of the UK! The problem here is that it’s invisible, so we tend not to think about it. But, as you saw in the SMARTPHONE episode, some companies are exploring products that make things like phone activity visible so that users can have a bit more control over how their devices use energy.

Holding On to Our Tech

With millions of new smartphones being manufactured each year to keep up with demand, what happens to all of the old handsets? A Digital Consumer Trends survey carried out by Deloitte suggested that, in 2022 alone, seven million smartphones would be left in drawers as users upgraded to new models, with 38% of respondents who bought a new phone keeping hold of their old device. Of these, 31% said they retained their old phone in case their new one broke or got lost, but another 14% indicated they simply couldn’t be bothered to get rid of their old one.

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What's In Your Phone?

By putting a smartphone into a blender to reduce it to a fine powder, and then carrying out a chemical analysis, scientists at the University of Plymouth have investigated exactly what a phone is made of. The number of elements that go into making a smartphone depends on the individual make and model, however, almost all phones contain at least 30 different naturally occurring elements, with some containing as many as 75. Some of these elements are extremely familiar to us. Copper is used for wiring within the phone; circuit connectors are

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coated in gold; a combination of tin, silver and copper creates the solder to join electronic components; the chip in the phone is embedded with silicon; and the battery casing is made from aluminium. Other elements may not be so well known. Indium is used in the touchscreen; tantalum is a critical part of the phone’s micro-capacitors; lithium and cobalt are used in the battery; and the display relies upon yttrium, dysprosium, praseodymium, europium, gadolinium, terbium and lanthanum.

Design for longevity and repair

Many modern products are simply not designed to be easily repaired, or they require specialist repair that can be expensive and exclusive. Even the simple act of replacing a phone battery is far harder than it used to be in the days of the Nokia 6210! Designing for repair is entirely possible and we have a lot of expert knowledge about how to do it. Alternative products are already emerging that challenge how we repair and hold on to our tech, such as the Fairphone.

Have simpler, better products

A phone that has 10 different physical functions has 10 different ways to go wrong (or out of date). How many times have you upgraded your phone because of just one feature? Focusing the design on one or two physical functions reduces that risk of redundancy, especially if you combine it with design for replacement or repair. Imagine a camera on your phone that you could swap out if you really needed to replace it, like the Fairphone

A new(er) normal

In America, during the Industrial Design movement, motivating consumers to buy products became part of the economic recovery from the great depression (for a snapshot of the history of Industrial Design, click here). As technology improved, so did the efficiency of production methods, particularly around new materials, like plastics in the mid 20th century, and then later with electronics.

As this continued, manufacturers, designers and advertisers had to find new ways to keep up with increasing consumption and, with rising populations and global supply chains, this became mass consumption.

We weren't always like this...

For example, if you were a farmer, building a house with timber and/or local stone makes a lot of sense economically and logistically. But, as soon as you have access to more advanced materials and supply chains, it means you can break the obvious link between the things we make and the resources. You can suddenly use steel or concrete to make far larger structures and do this in lots of different places.

Using new materials in itself isn’t much of a problem – in fact, they allow people to create amazing buildings and infrastructures. But, as soon as this becomes normal for most things, it becomes a problem.

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Design for better end-of-life

After hanging on to existing tech for as long as possible, when your tech really comes to the end of its life, it can only be recycled if it has been designed to make this practically possible.

If your phone has loads of different materials all glued together, it can’t be taken apart easily when it’s time to recover that material. By applying some very basic design principles, products can be made much easier to take apart at end of life.

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Out of Our Element(s)?

The European Chemical Society has identified that natural sources of seven of the elements found in smartphones (carbon, yttrium, gallium, arsenic, silver, indium and tantalum) are at serious risk of running out in the next 100 years. In fact, some – such as indium – may run out in as little as 20 years. They also identified that five elements used in smartphones (carbon, tungsten, tantalum, gold and tin) often originate from mines that rely on child or forced labour, or whose profits might be used to finance conflicts. For all the above reasons, continuing to extract the raw materials in this way is clearly not sustainable. To maintain the supply of all the elements required for manufacturing new smartphones, we will need to quickly become much better at recycling our old technology. Some have even proposed mining landfill sites to recover discarded devices, so that they can be deconstructed and the components within them recycled.

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Want to learn more? Watch Dr Zoe Laughlin perform a unique autopsy on a mobile phone to discover the precious elements that lie within, on 'The Secret Life of Landfill: A Rubbish History'

Having a better relationship with products

We don’t just have a functional or technical relationship with products – we have an emotional one. We love our phones, we couldn’t be without them, and we are genuinely upset when it drops into the toilet! Have you ever had a phone that just worked really well or felt nice to use? Better quality design leads to better relationships between people and products, making us more likely to take care of and keep hold of our devices.

A Growing Issue

UK Smartphone Users

As of 2023, there are approximately 55 million smartphone users in the UK, with 87% of the adult population now owning a smartphone. The increase in ownership has been rapid – just fifteen years ago, only 17% of adults had a smartphone. Alongside this growth in smartphone ownership, there has been a tendency for individual owners to regularly upgrade their phones. In the UK, 28% of smartphone owners replace their phone within two years of purchase, while 70% buy a new phone within four years.