4. Sustainability and recycling

What must not be forgotten when you look at the mobile phone in your hand is that every single part of that phone at some point had to come out of the ground.

The plastic, the glass, the precious metals, rare minerals, steel, copper and all the other material that make up the mobile in your hand, at some point had to be dug up as raw material which was then processed, refined, transported and shaped into each component.

So it does not make much sense to throw away all that material, energy and effort into landfill, never to be seen again.

A better way is to re-use as much of it as possible. The word is 'sustainability' - making as much use of our existing resources as possible. And a key method of doing this is to 'recycle'.