Pick up your phone. It’s probably already in your hand. How many separate raw materials do you reckon went into making it? Don’t Google it - just have a proper guess, and hold onto the number. I’ll come back to it in a second.

This edition is in partnership with Back Market, and it’s not a review - there’s nothing to buy at the end of it. They’ve put out a piece of global research called The Smartphone Extraction Gap, across six markets and six thousand people, and it’s the most uncomfortable thing I’ve read about this industry in years. I review tech for a living. I got the guess wrong too. Dive into their full details from Back Market at their Mine My Phone project.

So: the real numbers, the part of the supply chain nobody talks about, why none of this is actually your fault, and the one change that does more than all the rest put together. Let’s get into it!

Most people guess around thirty. Plenty guess ten or fewer. The real answer is sixty - sixty distinct raw materials, in a device that weighs about 200 grams. And that’s not even the number that got me. To manufacture that 200g phone, roughly 266kg of material has to come out of the ground. More than 1,300 times the weight of the finished thing in your hand. Your phone is an iceberg and we’re all staring at the tip. While we’re here: the supply chain behind it runs to about 200 suppliers. Most people who had a go at that one guessed twenty or fewer.

Cobalt is the one that stayed with me. It’s in the battery of essentially every phone on the market, and 60% of people surveyed had never heard of it. It largely comes out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the mines rely on labourers including children, some as young as six, carrying heavy loads in hazardous conditions. That isn’t a campaign group’s claim - it’s Amnesty International and UNICEF, cited in the report. Then here’s the comparison that made me genuinely uncomfortable: 48% of us connect clothing production to child labour. Only 19% make the same connection for the phone we spend six hours a day looking at. Fast fashion got its reckoning. The device in your pocket somehow didn’t.

Here’s where I’d push back on how this conversation usually goes. The average person keeps a phone for 2.5 years. Ask those same people how long a phone ought to last and they say 5.9. Nobody is throwing a working phone in a drawer for fun - 67% say battery life forces the issue, and 57% get pushed out by software: apps that drop support, security updates that stop arriving. The hardware is fine. The ecosystem simply stops cooperating. And you lot already know it. In the UK, 76% say new phone releases are just an excuse to make people spend more - the highest of any market surveyed - and 40% say new phones offer no genuinely useful features at all, also the highest recorded. That’s not apathy. That’s an audience that worked this out ages ago and hasn’t been given anywhere to put it.

This is the part that actually changed how I think about it, so stick with me for two numbers. Replacing a phone every 2.5 years works out at a raw material impact of 106.7kg a year. Keep the same phone for ten - and that figure already allows for two battery replacements, a screen repair and a full refurbishment - and it drops to 30.9kg. A 71% reduction, per person, mostly by doing nothing. The reason it works is that repairing or refurbishing a device takes roughly one-twentieth of the raw materials of building a new one. I’ve known refurbished was "better" in a vague, hand-wavy way for years. One-twentieth is a number you can actually hold onto. And the appetite is clearly there: around two-fifths would keep a phone longer given guaranteed ten-year software updates, cheaper battery replacements or decade-long warranties, and 70% of UK respondents would back legislation requiring exactly that. The demand exists. The infrastructure hasn’t caught up.

I’m not running a guilt trip here, and neither is the research - the whole finding is that people change their minds when someone finally shows them the numbers. So consider this me showing you the numbers.

Keep the one you’ve got for longer. Replace the battery instead of the phone. When you do upgrade, look at refurbished properly. And if you want the full picture, it’s all at minemyphone.com.

What did you guess? Hit reply and tell me - I’m curious how far off most of us were. Full write-up linked here.

~ Mark