Going places with an iPhone, Starbucks coffee cup in hand

I hope you are comfortably resting in your favourite chair, holding on to your Starbucks coffee cup as you intently peruse the ads on your iPhone beckoning you to explore the Taj Mahal or the snowy Alps. Have you stopped to consider all the places that your smartphone and coffee cup have visited or will soon be visiting in the course of their short existence on earth? If you have not, let me give you a short tour.

Did you know that, as of today, there are nearly 7 billion smartphones in use in the world, and the majority of them will be discarded within two years for the latest model with more bells and whistles? Planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption are part and parcel of the package you sign up for when you buy any digital device, not just smartphones. Your very own carbon footprint is getting larger by the day. So, spare me the tears when you vociferously complain about climate change.

Now, let us look at the birth and death lifecycle of smartphones and coffee cups.

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Your smartphone is an interesting mix of Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary strategies. Its genetic make-up incorporates fossil fuel-based plastics and the products of extractive and chemical industries such as silicon, gold, lithium, and sulfuric acids into a tidy little package, put together by assembly line workers and dismantled by electronic waste workers, mostly women and children in developing and undeveloped countries across the globe. In producing and recycling smartphones, mountains and forests have been reduced to a wasteland and replaced by mountains of non-biodegradable waste. The lush greenery of nature has been supplanted by promises of green technologies by companies with evergreen patents and greenbacks. Birds and bees have ceded the skies to satellites and drones in IT’s never-ending quest to keep the world connected, if only to make shopping and the sharing of inanities and misinformation easier.

Likewise, the evolution of your coffee cup can be traced back to some unfortunate five-year-old tree that got chopped down, transported by a fossil fuel (the tree’s ancestors) -powered truck to a lumber mill, stripped of its bark, ground up and turned into pulp. The pulp was cleansed using toxic chemicals such as chlorine, and flattened, dried and coated with polyethylene (another fossil fuel product) to make it heat-resistant, and eventually turned into cups.

The residues at each step in the manufacturing process end up in public waterways, just like the coffee cup you just tossed in the sewer or on the roadway. If the rivers get polluted and make the water undrinkable, bottled water from previously public, but now privately-owned, waterways is always available for making more coffee! (Your plastic water bottle also ends up in the sewer).

As for the deceased five-year-old tree, it rarely gets replaced. Deforestation is easy and the monetary rewards are immediate. Reforestation is expensive and the monetary rewards, if any, are way into the future. In this immediate gratification culture of ours, who has the time to wait?

By the way, the useful life of a coffee cup is under 10 minutes, though the manufacturing process takes several months, and the decomposing of discarded cups takes years. Just like your iPhone.

In his book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, author Amitav Ghosh traced the origins of our current climate crisis to Western colonialism’s ruthless exploitation of human beings and the natural world. Ghosh detailed how, in 1621, the Dutch East India Company exterminated the entire population of Banda Islands in Indonesia to gain control of the spice trade, in specific two spices – nutmeg and mace, both produced by the nutmeg tree and considered more valuable than precious metals.

Today, we have the nutmeg tree’s equivalent in lithium and cobalt, two minerals essential for powering smartphones and electric cars, found in great quantities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a heavily forested and pristine area second only to the Amazon. Try to draw your own conclusions.

Now that you know a little bit more about smartphones and coffee cups, perhaps you would like some insider information on the contents of your coffee cup? Your best bet would be the coffee plantation workers in Assam, Colombia, or Costa Rica. But please don’t call them. Either they do not have smartphones or, if they do, they are prohibited from using phones during working hours since it would detract them from harvesting the best possible coffee beans for your enjoyment.

Silicon chips and coffee beans – today’s spices.