Impacts of Cell Phones to the Environment IT & Computer Science Essay (Essay Sample)

Impacts of Cell Phones to the Environment
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Impacts of Cell Phones to the Environment
In the US, people acquire cell phones and use them for less than two years in which they finally discard them. Manufacturing and discarding these cell phones have a direct negative impact on the environment. First, there are catastrophic mining wastes of various metals that spills into the environment. Copper, aluminum, and iron are the major metals contained in cell phones (Baig, 2019). These metals emit vast volumes of tailings during their extraction from underneath. Again, some of the methods used to extract these metals are not environmentally friendly. For instance, the extraction of copper as a raw material for manufacturing cell phones poses great damage to the environment (Baig, 2019). The mining process applied is referred to as the shaft method that involves digging underneath to where it is located. The digging process is usually explosive and disturbing to the environment. The process causes earth tremors, and hollows and voids are created, making the environment appear ugly.
Furthermore, Baig (2019) confirms that some materials used to manufacture cell phones, such as plastic, greatly affect the environment's discarding process. Given that plastic materials are non-biodegradable, they usually cause massive damage to the environment in two major ways.