The World Behind the Screen
Hidden behind your phone’s glass screen lies a chemical masterpiece rooted in global collaboration. The minerals that enable every birthday text message and video call to grandma come from all over the world, but the process to extract them can harm the people who mine them and damage the surrounding environment. However, eco-friendly technologies and recycling methods are showing promise.
Your phone contains between 30-40 elements, including various rare-earth elements. This is more than the human body, which requires less than 30 elements and gets 99.9% of its mass from just 11. Many of the elements are sourced from China, Chile, India, Argentina, South Africa, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — among others. But pulling these elements from the earth is not nearly as easy as tapping a touchscreen.
Lithium is an essential mineral in the batteries of phones, as well as electric vehicles and laptops. Chile, as well as Argentina and Bolivia, are major sources of the world’s lithium. The extraction process involves pumping brine mixed with other metals onto the surface and drying them for months. Ultimately, it consumes hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per tonne of lithium, leading to less water for farming, contaminated streams, and impacts on biodiversity.
The DRC is rich in cobalt, another major component of batteries, but houses notorious, artisanal cobalt mines, where miners use basic tools like shovels and pickaxes in shallow open pits or narrow underground shafts. These mines have had documented cases of adults and children hand-digging without proper protective equipment, leading to injuries and fatalities. Dust and wastewater from these mines carry toxic metals, which can lead to respiratory disease, cancer, or chronic health problems.
Cobalt and lithium are crucial elements in batteries due to their long-term stability and high energy density. This means they can hold more energy in a smaller space than other materials. Because of this and the increasing need for high-quality batteries, it is unlikely that mining operations for these elements will cease.
Researchers have been looking for ways to reduce our reliance on these harmful mining practices. One potential solution has been to create sodium-based batteries. When compared to lithium, it’s more abundant, less flammable, and can be sourced from seawater evaporation, a less environmentally damaging process. Some manufacturers have already begun pivoting to sodium-ion batteries, as demonstrated by Natron Energy’s planned sodium-ion “gigafactory” in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, involving around a $1.4 billion investment and expected to create over 1,000 jobs. The main downside of sodium is that it has a comparatively lower energy density, meaning it might only be viable in applications where a small volume or weight is not critical. This makes sodium-based batteries better for storing energy in large batteries used in electrical grids or electric vehicles, rather than the comparatively tiny batteries that a handheld phone requires.
Another approach is “urban mining”, or recycling these compounds from electronic waste, thereby unlocking a new source of these materials which requires far less environmental degradation. By improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our recycling methods, we also move towards a more circular economy where the materials could have their utility extended by reusing them multiple times.
To this end, scientists have been looking at innovative new methods to recover critical materials from electronic waste. For example, Dr. Amit Kumar, a Technical Manager at Heraeus Precious Metals in Santa Fe Springs, California, co-authored a review paper in Accounts of Chemical Research that details how coordination chemistry can be used in rare-earth element separations. Imagine trying to find your house key in a bin full of lookalikes. Traditional methods are like melting the whole bin to later extract the remnants of your key through multiple refining steps. By using coordination chemistry, a chemical “glove” can be designed that is specifically shaped to grab the rare earth element of interest while leaving the rest behind. Dr. Kumar explained that this works because the atoms of the lighter metals caught in the molecular glove stick together and sink, while the heavier ones stay afloat, which allows them to be separated. This process happens in a solution at room temperature and requires a fraction of the energy of traditional methods.
However, while these chemical “gloves” are incredibly effective for facilitating separation, they are currently expensive and energy-intensive to manufacture. “It’s hard to bring the same process from the lab scale to the industrial scale,” said Dr. Kumar. Doing so would require handling new input and waste streams while making sure the process remained affordable compared to traditional methods. Closing the gap between a lab-scale success and an industrially available solution is the next great challenge. Clearing this hurdle represents the difference between a future that continues to rely mostly on extraction or one that learns to recover.
Your phone is a window into a world of global collaboration, but it’s also the product of a “material debt” that comes with a heavy human and environmental price tag. However, by rethinking how we use and reuse these elements, we have a chance to pay that debt back. Demanding more ethical supply chains, a more circular economy, and supporting the science of recycling helps ensure that the technology powering our lives doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s. Our digital future might be inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be destructive. It can be one where every “happy birthday” text is enabled through technologies that respect both the planet and the people on it.
