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0 There is so much excitement when a new phone is released. There are long queues in the shops. People waiting to get the phones for absolutely vain reasons. Relatively new to old working phones are thrown out. The human insecurities are exploited via marketing campaigns. We are unaware or chose to ignore that there are implications – environmental, social and health implications associated with developing a new phone. Some of these implication include:
- Exploitation of Africa’s natural resources leaving the people still very poor. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
- Mining of these resources causing environmental pollution to land and sea affecting the ecosystem
- More radiation being created making people sick
- Energy is used to create these new phones creating new CO2 emissions leading to global warming
- Batch of phones will be thrown into the garbage and later sent to landfills at alarming rates.
- Another batch will be sent to developing countries, which will eventually end up in the dump sites poisoning the water ways and making people sick.
- On a good day, some will be recycled using more energy and more CO2 emissions leading to global warming causing climate change
- Hopefully recycling will be done using environmentally sound management practices.
Maybe if we stop ignoring these implications, curb our materialistic tendencies and request for more information and accountability from our manufacturers and governments maybe, just maybe we can stop the creation of a new phone every single year or in some cases every six months thereby protecting the environment, ourselves and our future generation from harm.
International Development | Africa | Clean Technologies | Climate Resilience | Humanitarian | Fairness
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