What makes your mobile phone so precious?

We all know the exceptional importance of our mobile phones in our modern day lives. They’ve become some of our most treasured possessions; essential for communication, entertainment and, with the advent of the app economy, all manner of everyday activities. For some of us, they may even have become an extension of ourselves.

But we’d like to invite you to have a deeper think about what exactly is so precious about your mobile – what makes it special?

For us here at Fairphone, we also think about what goes into building your phone – not just what it does for you as a finished product. For us, it’s also about the materials – which are often labelled “precious”. We call them precious, because we value them not only for what they allow us to achieve technologically but also what they could allow many people in poorer countries to achieve socially and economically – if only there were a fairer playing field. They could allow many people in poorer countries to achieve socially and economically – if only there were a fairer playing field.

As an initiative, Fairphone is already actively catalyzing change in Tin and Cobalt production – two major precious materials that your mobile phones contain today.  We’re aiming to give a fairer deal to those at the heart of sourcing these materials – enabling them to really gain from a process that they are, at best, getting minimal value from at the moment.

And we’ve got even bigger plans for a larger array of other precious materials in the very near future, aiming to save the environment tonnes of toxic waste. Think about, for instance, using bio-plastics for the phone casing and sustainable materials developed at the cutting edge of technology.

We invite you to join our quest towards making sure that all the stuff that goes into your phone and makes it so precious to you – all the various elements, metals and things you probably rarely think about but without which your phone could not be built – also ends up creating even more, real, lasting precious value for the local communities surrounding the mines where these materials ultimately come from.