The fairphone: Ethics vs speed

There are few products in our world as amazing as our smartphones. It’s an entire computer shrunk to pocket size, connecting to the world through the cellular network and Wi-Fi. They may be tiny and light, but they come with tons of baggage. In America alone, we throw 150 million of them away every year. They are made with conflict minerals, where the sale of tantalum, tin and tungsten is financing civil wars. Some of them are produced in sweatshop conditions by exploited workers. They are sealed up so that they cannot be easily repaired.

 

Yvon Choinard of Patagonia once told Joel Mackower, founder of GreenBiz.com, why he wouldn’t own an iPhone. “Try and open up an iPhone,” he said. “Try and get it repaired. It’s a disposable item. They don’t want you to fix that iPhone, they want you to buy a new one next year. I can’t relate to a company like that,” he added.

 

Then there’s the Fairphone. It’s not the fastest or lightest smartphone around. But it’s built from the ground up around the principles of openness and fairness. This is a serious challenge. Why? Because there are serious problems and here are just a few:

 

Mining: There are 40 different minerals in a smartphone, and several of those are at the root of problems, from pollution to child labour to civil war. Fairphone tries to go right to the source and buy minerals and metals that were mined fairly, paying decent wages to the miners and minimising environmental degradation.

 

Design: The phone is designed to be an open one so that you can change the battery, upgrade parts and fix it if it breaks.

 

Manufacturing: The Fairphone is built in China like most of the others, but the company picks its suppliers because of their “willingness to work on social and environmental performance as well as adhere to our technological requirements”.

 

Lifecycle: The phones are upgradeable and repairable so they have a longer life. When it’s finally time for replacement, the company will take it back. The Fairphone 2, which was revealed on June 16, takes it up a notch higher with fully modular construction, ease of repair, a built-in rubber case to protect the screen and a “mature” platform. It’s not the fastest but it does the job, offering “a nice balance between functionality, performance, availability and cost.”

 

It’s not cheap at about $580 although prices should come down by next year. But there’s always a price to pay for ethically made products, and many are willing to pay it.