A few years ago a video circulated a lot showing the evolution of desks from 1980 to the present day. About forty years ago the desks would have been full of objects: computers, notepads, newspapers, calculators, fax machines, clocks, calendars, and even a bulletin board with some photographs hanging. Today all that remains are a laptop and a smartphone: all the objects that were there before have been replaced, becoming applications or part of the smartphone operating systems.
This radical change took place within a few years, that is, since in 2007 Apple launched the iPhone, the object that started the era of smartphones. Since then, thanks to the advent of the Android competitor, billions of smartphones have been sold, a huge figure that worries some especially for the environmental impact they may have. More rarely, however, we discuss all the less things and resources that we produce and use thanks to the existence of smartphones.
Building so many smartphones requires the use of metal, plastic, glass and other materials in large quantities, some of which are quite rare: a research by the European Chemical Society, which brings together more than 160,000 chemists from 40 associations around the world, shows how some of the materials needed to build smartphones are less and less widespread on our planet, and some could disappear within a century. Furthermore, the increasingly massive use we make of smartphones implies a large consumption of electricity (it is estimated that users who make intensive use of their iPhone in a year consume more energy than a refrigerator), which in order to be produced requires the plus the use of fossil fuels, with consequent damage to the environment.
Yet, as Andrew McAfee, who co-directs a research center at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston that studies the impact of technologies in the world economy, wrote in Wired, there are other factors that suggest that things are a little less negative than we can imagine. For example, in the last ten years the consumption of electricity in the United States has remained substantially unchanged, that of plastic has slowed compared to the years before the economic crisis of 2007, and also the consumption of steel, copper, gold, and fertilizer. water, cultivated land, timber, paper and other materials decreased.
To explain this decline, McAfee talks about the iPhone and the phenomenon described in the video on the evolution of desks. McAfee cites an article by writer Steve Cichon that appeared in the Huffington Post in 2017, in which he argued that we should think differently about the 2 billion iPhones produced in recent years: we should think about how much raw materials have been saved by allowing people to have in your pockets an object that includes a series of objects all together at the same time.
McAfee defines this phenomenon as “dematerialization”, a theory that in economics means the reduction of materials necessary for the functioning of a society's economy. The point is to understand how it happened and why it happened right now.
According to McAfee, the first explanation – which is the most obvious – is that technological progress has affected not only smartphones but all production, from industrial to agricultural. “All of these technologies require a lot of electricity, but at the same time they save a lot of energy for the economy in general. It is for this reason that electricity consumption is stable in the United States and total energy use is slightly higher than in the years preceding the economic crisis “.
The second explanation of dematerialization, according to McAfee, is instead less immediate but equally important: capitalism. In capitalist society, companies are not only forced to produce and sell more and more, but also to do so by trying to spend as little as possible. This has led them to save on natural resources and energy, leveraging the most advanced technologies available, and consequently reducing their environmental impact.
McAfee uses the cardboard example to explain this passage. The enormous growth that the e-commerce sector has had in recent years, thanks to services such as Amazon and eBay, could suggest that all the boxes that are shipped every day around the world have increased the production of cardboard. . In fact, the data shows that less cardboard was used for shipping in the United States in 2015 than in 1995. Capitalism and competition have pushed manufacturers to save on shipping and look for new ways to ship items that are cheaper than cardboard. , taking advantage of technological progress.
According to McAfee, we must certainly not hope that capitalism and technological progress will solve all the environmental problems of the world, for which active intervention by the governments of individual countries is necessary, but we must also not pessimistically think that products like the iPhone are putting our planet at risk. “They're actually doing the opposite,” says McAfee. “They are taking us into a second Enlightenment, this time physical rather than intellectual. I predict that during the 21st century this Enlightenment will spread from the United States and other rich countries to poorer countries, and we can finally begin to have a stable and healthy relationship with the whole Earth “.
However, the McAfee article neglects many aspects related to the production cycles of smartphones, which for the most part of technological products do not take place in the United States, but in China. And in China, the production of 2 billion iPhones and billions of other smartphones has meant a greater consumption of energy, land and other resources to build huge factories that churn out millions of mobile phones a day.
Measuring the actual impact of a single product like the smartphone on the planet – for better or for worse – is still very complicated, and McAfee himself admits to leaving out some elements in his analysis. Today we know that the invention and spread of the automobile have radically changed our societies, but that at the same time it has become a determining factor in the worsening of the planet's environmental conditions. It took decades to understand the extent of these transformations, and they will probably also be needed for smartphones.
