Facebook and Smart phones
 Whats wrong with them ??

They use unnecessarily large amounts of electricity which are powered by fossil fuels and nuclear, encourage the mining of rare earth minerals and leave behind toxic waste. They are designed for a short life span and rarely fully recycled.

Remember the old fashioned Nokia phone? I still have one and it only needs charging once every 10 days ! How often do people charge their iPhone? ... 
 and seems to be unbreakable ! 

It is good to also remember that every time your facebook tab is open you are tapped in to their huge data centres.  Many of the data centres are set up where energy prices are the cheapest this is due to the huge amount of energy they use.  It wouldn't be so bad if they were using renewable energy.  They have been saying for a while they will do by 2020. Question is , is it the best use of the energy generated?




One data center can use enough electricity to power 180,000 homes. So the more we are on it, the more energy we use, our end and theirs. So just be aware and at least limit your time to what you think is really necessary.





The iPhone is just one reason why the information-communications-technologies (ICT) ecosystem, otherwise known as the digital economy, demands such a large and growing amount of energy. The global ICT system includes everything from smartphones to laptops to digital TVs to — especially — the vast and electron-thirsty computer-server farms that make up the backbone of what we call “the cloud.”


In his report, Mills estimates that the ICT system now uses 1,500 terawatt-hours of power per year. That’s about 10% of the world’s total electricity generation or roughly the combined power production of Germany and Japan. It’s the same amount of electricity that was used to light the entire planet in 1985. Read more: The Surprisingly Large Energy Footprint of the Digital Economy TIME.com http://science.time.com/2013/08/14/power-drain-the-digital-cloud-is-using-more-energy-than-you-think/


How necessary is it for us to burn this amount of fossil fuels ?


Also to manufacture smart phones they use rare earth metals, such as Coltan which people are fighting and dying over in the Congo. Toxic and radioactive waste left over from the industry has been recorded in Malaysia. Residents there began to protest, and a few activists took a Geiger counter to the plant, where they found levels of radiation that were off the charts—up to 88 times higher than those allowed under international guidelines. Birth defects and children in the village have been found with leukemia.



Our lust for new devices isn’t sustainable. Some of the key materials used to make them, mainly rare earth elements, are in tight supply, in part because the primary source of rare earths are mines in one country, China.
But the most minerals are found in Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East where it´s bought very cheap.

Rare earth minerals are not the only valuable metals in your smartphone. You will also find lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium and other minerals like copper, gold, palladium, and platinum in your cell phone. National Parks around the world are now being opened and contaminated in the desperate search for gold and copper.

If you are going to recycle your old phone only a tiny percent of it will be reused.



And where does the waste end up?

In Malaysia truckers are just told to dispose of it. The company's don't say where or how to dump the waste, and as drivers were paid by the load—the quicker the trip, the more money they earned. "Sometimes they would tell us it was fertilizer, so we would take it to local farms," one driver says. "My uncle was a vegetable farmer, so I gave some to him." Other times, the refinery officials said the stuff was quicklime, so one driver painted his house with it. "He thought it was great, because it made all the mosquitoes and mice stay away."




In 2010, a local paper visited Asian Rare Earth's dump site and found 80,000 drums containing 4.2 million gallons of radioactive thorium hydroxide.

 
iPhone 5 - No Thanks

 

 


Your Smartphone's Dirty, Radioactive Secret
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/11/rare-earth-elements-iphone-malaysia

 

Nov 8, 2017


The model for recycling our old smartphones is actually causing massive pollution. 


Around 1.5 billion phones are sold a year nearly 100 million pounds of toxic e-waste is generated each year and electronics account for up to 70 percent of landfills’ toxic waste.

Asides from the waste, the workers in the 'recycling' plants are exposed to nickel, cadmium and mercury among other toxic fumes, which leak into the surrounding air, ground and drinking water. This can lead to a wide variety of serious, sometimes life-threatening health problems, including cancers and birth defects.

Our best hope lies in a much bigger shift in perspective: Having manufacturers design expressly with reusability in mind. This cradle-to-cradle approach to production is a cornerstone of the
circular economy movement.


https://www.recode.net/2017/11/8/16621512/where-does-my-smartphone-iphone-8-x-go-recycling-afterlife-toxic-waste-environment



Search and you will find many accounts around the world of this toxic waste that is being created for demand for smartphones. The story starts where the minerals are mined from before they end up at Apple's Chinese factories.


Reports then show teenage girls working 15-hour shifts cleaning screens with toxic solvents and suicides among exhausted workers whose lives are no longer their own.


These gadgets are then designed to break, are designed  with in built obsolescence which adds more toxic waste to the Earth.


DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT IS IN YOUR PHONE?





Unbenannt

http://htl.moedling.at/umwelttechnik/hp/2013/06/11/rare-earth-metals/



FAIRPHONE

So after reading this and are looking for a new phone ....and wont buy a second hand one see the Fairphone. The modular phone that’s built to last. The world’s first ethical, modular smartphone. You shouldn’t have to choose between a great phone and a fair supply chain.

https://www.fairphone.com




Many believe that we need social media for a revolution, I say we need to talk to each other more. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mandela, The Woman's Rights Movements, the abolition of slavery, the fall of the Berlin wall etc all achieved so much without social media, so can we . 

 
SO THINK BEFORE YOU USE THESE DEVICES AND ASK YOURSELF HOW NECESSARY IS IT. LIMIT THE TIME YOU ARE ON THEM AND SPREAD THE WORD TO MAKE OTHERS CONSCIOUS OF THEIR ACTIONS.


TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

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