Recycle iPhone – Why?
According to a Daily Mail survey, nearly 5 million people in the UK have discarded their old smartphones. They are indirectly polluting the environment with this behavior, as many components of the phone contain harmful metals. Additionally, outdated circuit boards can be recycled to recover valuable metals.
Mercury is found in batteries, crystal displays, and circuit boards; lead and beryllium (a poisonous chemical widely used to harden alloys) are found in component joints; and arsenic and silica are found in microprocessors.
The campaign calls for recycling iphones to protect the environment
To address this issue, Back Market, a company that specializes in refurbishing outdated electronics, has started a campaign encouraging people to discard their phones. “A recycled mobile device can save up to 258 kg of raw materials,” according to Back Market’s advertisement.
As a result, the smartphone’s exterior has a plethora of unique components. They are available in gold, silver, and a variety of other rare and costly metals. We can find 0.034 g of gold inside an iPhone, which is worth approximately 2.1 USD.
Additionally, silver and palladium are the iPhone‘s next two most costly metals, weighing 0.34 g and 0.015 g, respectively. Additionally, these cellphones contain a trace amount of platinum.
Aluminum and copper weigh 25g and 15g, respectively, in the iPhone. Their worth, however, is negligible in comparison to some of the precious metals discussed above.
According to mining business 911 Metallurgist, a ton of iPhone has almost 300 times the amount of gold found in a ton of gold ore. Manufacturers of smartphones frequently cover microchips with trace quantities of gold to avoid corrosion. Meanwhile, the quantity of silver found in a ton of iPhone can be up to 6.5 times that found in a ton of ore.
As a result, it is extremely wasteful to discard an outdated iPhone. Not only that, according to watercalculator.org, corporations will require more than 12,000 liters of water to extract enough raw materials to manufacture a phone. This quantity is sufficient to fill a commercial oil tanker.
The Royal Mint, the UK mint, stated in March that it will construct a state-of-the-art factory capable of recovering gold from abandoned circuit boards. Each week, the company intends to process approximately 90 tons of circuit boards and recover hundreds of kilograms of gold.
