Environmental damage

Read the following information about the potential environmental damage caused by mobile phones. Your task is to convert this information into an easily remembered mind map. When you do this, try to use simple pictures, colour and keywords. Try to avoid using sentences. The aim is to produce an easily remembered picture that summarises a lot of information.

Did you know that according to some estimates, there are over seven billion mobile phones in use today? Mobile phone users upgrade their phones on average once every eighteen months to two years and of those handsets exchanged, only about a fifth are thought to be recycled properly. To put that another way, about five and half billion phones every two years or so are just thrown in the bin, where they then get dumped in a landfill site or incinerated.

It takes a lot of natural resources to make a phone and these resources cannot just be magically replaced. Every phone needs a lot of water to make the raw materials that goes into it. Then you need a whole range of chemicals, including lead, mercury, tin, chromium, cadmium, tungsten and gold, all of which require a lot of energy (and water) to get out of the earth. These can be extremely harmful when recycled, both to the environment and to people. For example, the cadmium in just one mobile phone battery could be enough to pollute around six hundred thousand litres of water if it isn’t disposed of properly. Flame retardants, lead and beryllium can cause many very serious illnesses, including cancer, liver damage, kidney damage and damage to nervous systems. This is a serious problem and recycling itself brings additional challenges.

If you bury phones in landfill sites, the chemicals can eventually leech out and pollute the land and water table in the area. This can then pollute the food chain and eventually start causing health problems for the local population. If you recycle phones, there is a danger that emissions during the recycling process can pollute the air. In third world countries, where a lot of electronic equipment is sent (using yet more energy to power the ships) standards for recycling are often very poor and the workers whose job it is to recycle phones and other computer equipment are at risk of serious illnesses, as are those who live near recycling plants. It isn’t very moral either, for the first world to be dumping its old, potentially dangerous products onto the third world!