Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of toxic chemicals in car manufacturing. Hell, cars (particularly old ones) produce these toxic chemicals continuously while you drive them! Smart phones are a hell of a lot less toxic than cars.

As for the comparative benefits, we could argue until the cows come home - both products are insanely useful and life-changing - but if we simply declared them equally useful, that would make phones a better bargain due to the much smaller amounts of toxicity.

And there are not only environmental effects but social too. IEEE Spectrum has an article this month regarding this. Is a good read.

Cracking Down on Conflict Minerals

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/cracking-d...

The good news is that services like gazelle, Amazon Buyback, eBay Instant Sale and Verizon Trade-in are making it more likely that old phones get sold and kept in use, instead of rotting in a drawer until they're tossed into the household waste.