“If we produce phones, we destroy stuff,” says Bas van Abel, founder of Fairphone. This may seem an odd remark from a smartphone company owner, but there is much that’s unconventional about Van Abel’s attitude towards modern life’s most indispensable personal possession – not least that the Dutchman had never owned a mobile phone before starting his company, and he refused to use one for two years after that. But then, his intention was never simply to produce another smartphone, rather to make one that would benefit the world.
More Phones than Humans
Consider this: there are more mobile devices than humans on Earth, each with an average lifespan of two to three years. Inside a smartphone are hundreds of components made from minerals often sourced from conflict zones where profits are used to finance violent militias; these materials are also sometimes mined in unsafe working conditions, using methods that pollute the environment.
The components are often assembled in factories where workers are paid below a living wage. To make the device thinner, methods such as gluing the battery to the case – which renders the phone useless at the end of its battery life – are employed.
A foundation of trust
Van Abel has a thing for making stuff last. He grew up in Nijmegen – the oldest city in the Netherlands – born to parents who have been together since they were teenagers; 43-year-old Van Abel met his partner when he was just 15. After studying interaction design at university, in 2003 he joined the Waag Society, a non-profit that seeks to further sociocultural betterment through technology. During his 10 years there, he learned about the use of conflict materials in tech goods, becoming aware of the collateral damage from their manufacture.
He chose to highlight this with a mobile phone. In 2013, he launched a crowdfunding initiative for ‘the world’s first ethical smartphone’, which attracted 25,000 pre-orders. “The phone didn’t exist yet and still people paid more than €300 [$340] for something they might never get,” he says. “And everybody [in the industry] had told us, ‘Nobody cares.’”
If we produce phones, we destroy stuff.Founder Bas van Abel talks about the tenuous situation in the industry.
Fairphone 4: A Smartphone to self-repair
Since then, the company has produced four more phones, most recently the Fairphone 4 just last year. Each comes with a screwdriver and is easily repairable; also, as the phone is modular, owners of the previous model can upgrade by swapping in the latest components, such as a new 48MP rear camera. The plastic used is 40-per-cent recycled, and the minerals are ethically sourced, though still from conflict zones.
The solution lies with us, the people who buy stuffVan Abel
“We don’t go to Australia and say it’s conflict-free; we go to the Congo and set up programmes to improve working conditions and the tracing of minerals,” says Van Abel, who created the Fair Cobalt Alliance to ensure ethical practices, from mines to manufacturing, meaning others using the same supply chain also ‘do the right thing’. “I’m pretty sure there are iPhones containing Fairtrade gold without Apple knowing.”
More than 200,000 Fairphones were sold by the end of 2020 – a drop in the ocean next to the 2.2 billion iPhones produced since 2007, but a demonstration of what’s possible. “The solution lies with us, the people who buy stuff,” says Van Abel. “Buying new things starts with someone with a spade in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Once you realise that, you’ll see how special it is that we can turn a bunch of rocks into a phone.”
