The Life Cycle of Consumer Products

Where did your phone come from?

Your phone might have been designed in one country, assembled in another, with a battery containing cobalt mined in a third country and lithium from a fourth. Its glass, its chips and its tiny magnets each started as rocks or brine somewhere on Earth. And when you're done with it, it will go somewhere.

Every product has a life cycle. In this lesson you'll use what you know about elements and compounds to assess the impacts of a product's whole life, from the mine to the end, and to suggest improvements. This is how engineers, policy makers and responsible companies think.

The six stages of a life cycle

1. Extract raw materials: mining ores, pumping oil or gas, logging, farming.
2. Process and refine: separating and purifying elements and compounds (for example, getting aluminium out of its ore).
3. Manufacture and package: shaping materials into parts and putting the product together.
4. Transport and sell: moving the product by ship, train and truck to stores or your door.
5. Use: the energy, water or other products needed while you use it.
6. End of life: reuse, repair, recycling, burning for energy, or landfill.

A life cycle assessment looks at the impacts of every stage, not just the one you can see.

Three kinds of impact

When you assess a stage, look at three kinds of impact. Each can be positive or negative.

• Social: people's health and safety, working conditions, communities, culture, access to products.
• Environmental: habitat loss, air and water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water use, waste.
• Economic: jobs, costs, profits, taxes, trade, and costs passed on to others (such as cleaning up pollution).

Case study: the aluminium can

Elements and compounds: a can is mostly aluminium (Al), mixed with small amounts of other metals (such as magnesium and manganese) to make it stronger, with a thin plastic coating inside.

1. Extraction: aluminium is never found as a pure element in nature; it is too reactive. It is mined as bauxite ore, which contains aluminium oxide. Bauxite mines are open pits that remove forests and soil in countries such as Australia, Guinea and Brazil. Mining provides jobs, but can displace communities and pollute water.
2. Processing: bauxite is refined into pure aluminium oxide (Al₂O₃, the ionic compound you named in this unit). Then electricity is used to split it into aluminium metal and oxygen. This takes a huge amount of electricity. Canada is one of the world's major aluminium producers, and most Canadian smelters, in Québec and British Columbia, run on hydroelectricity, which produces much less greenhouse gas than electricity from coal.
3. Manufacture: aluminium is rolled into thin sheets (it is malleable) and shaped into cans.
4. Transport: aluminium is light (density 2.70 g/cm³), so cans are cheaper to ship than glass bottles.
5. Use: almost no impact.
6. End of life: aluminium can be recycled again and again without losing quality, using about 5% of the energy needed to make it from bauxite. In Ontario, cans go in the recycling bin, and alcohol containers carry a deposit you get back when you return them.

Case study: the smartphone

A smartphone contains dozens of elements. Some are mined in only a few places in the world, and some are mined under unsafe conditions. Cobalt for batteries, for example, comes largely from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where human rights groups have reported dangerous working conditions and child labour at some mines.

Studies by phone makers show that most of a phone's lifetime greenhouse gas emissions come from making it, not from charging it. So one of the best ways to reduce a phone's impact is simply to keep it longer: use a case, replace the battery, repair the screen. At end of life, phones are e-waste. Ontario has e-waste collection sites where the metals can be recovered; phones thrown in the garbage waste those materials and can leak harmful substances in landfills.