Every phone, laptop and tablet starts as rock dug out of the ground and ends, sooner or later, as waste. In between, it passes through mines, smelters and factories that most buyers never see. The photos below, first gathered in 2015, show some of those hidden costs: children digging for cobalt in Congo, armed groups profiting from minerals, dormitory windows fenced in after a wave of worker suicides at Foxconn in China, and a black lake of mining waste in Inner Mongolia.
The short answer to "what does our tech really cost?" is this: the price tag leaves out the people and places at the start and end of the supply chain. Some of the problems shown here have improved since 2015 because of laws, audits and public pressure. Others have not. Below we walk through each photo, correct a few claims that circulated with them, and explain what has changed and what you can do as a buyer.
Children in Congo's cobalt and copper mines
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) supplies roughly 70 percent of the world's mined cobalt, a metal used in the lithium-ion batteries inside phones, laptops and electric cars. Much of it comes from large industrial mines, but a significant share is dug by hand by so-called artisanal miners, who work in shallow pits and tunnels with no safety equipment.
Children are part of that workforce. In 2014 UNICEF estimated that about 40,000 children were working in mines across southern DRC, many of them in cobalt. Amnesty International's 2016 report This Is What We Die For documented children as young as seven carrying sacks of ore, earning a dollar or two a day, and traced cobalt from these areas through traders and refiners to battery makers that supplied major electronics brands.
The International Labour Organization lists mining among the worst forms of child labour because of collapsing tunnels, toxic dust and heavy loads that damage growing bodies. One correction is worth making: a figure that circulated with these photos, saying 16.9 percent of Congolese children aged 5 to 14 work in mining, appears to describe children working in all sectors, most of them in farming, not mining alone. The real situation is serious enough without inflated numbers.
Conflict minerals and armed groups in eastern Congo
Further east, in the Kivu provinces, the issue is not only child labour but war. Tin, tantalum (refined from the ore known as coltan), tungsten and gold, often shortened to "3TG", are used in circuit boards and capacitors. For years, armed groups and army units taxed, controlled or traded these minerals to fund their operations.
One of those groups is the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), formed by Hutu exiles who included people involved in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, in which an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 people were murdered. UN expert reports found that the FDLR financed itself partly through gold, tin and coltan. The original 2015 post claimed that the groups behind the genocide "operate the mines" that supply American tech firms. That goes too far: the FDLR was one of many armed actors in a messy trade, not the operator of the industry's supply. Still, until regulation arrived, minerals from conflict areas could easily end up in consumer electronics.
That regulation came in two main steps. Section 1502 of the US Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 requires US-listed companies to report whether their products contain 3TG from the DRC or its neighbours, and the European Union's Conflict Minerals Regulation has applied to importers since January 2021. Researchers still debate how well these rules work, and armed groups remain active in eastern Congo.
Foxconn: suicides, safety nets and long hours
Foxconn, the Taiwanese company also known as Hon Hai, assembles a large share of the world's electronics, including iPhones, at giant campuses in China. In 2010, 18 young workers attempted suicide at its factories, and 14 of them died, most at the Shenzhen complex. The company responded by installing nets around buildings and bars on dormitory windows, as these photos show.
Workers were also asked to sign a letter in which they promised not to harm themselves, and which limited the compensation their families could claim. Shown above, the letter drew international criticism and was reportedly withdrawn. Foxconn also raised basic wages in Shenzhen considerably in 2010 and brought in counsellors.
The company held large morale rallies, like the one above, where workers in "I love Foxconn" shirts gathered. Critics, including Chinese labour researchers, pointed to the underlying causes: military-style management, isolation from family, repetitive work and very long overtime.
Pay and hours were the core complaint. A 2012 audit by the Fair Labor Association, commissioned by Apple, found that workers at three Foxconn plants regularly worked more than 60 hours a week, beyond Chinese legal limits, and that many felt their pay did not cover basic needs. The old post compared an average worker's pay with founder Terry Gou's fortune, which Forbes puts in the billions of dollars; the contrast is real, even if exact figures change every year. Apple and Foxconn pledged reforms, and Apple now publishes annual supplier responsibility reports, but labour groups continue to report excessive overtime during peak production.
The toxic lake of rare earth waste in Baotou
Rare earth elements such as neodymium are used in the tiny, powerful magnets inside phone speakers, vibration motors, hard drives, electric car motors and wind turbines. China mines about 70 percent of the world's rare earths and refines around 90 percent of them, according to the International Energy Agency.
The biggest source is the Bayan Obo deposit near the city of Baotou. The original post placed Baotou in Mongolia; in fact it lies in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China, not the independent country of Mongolia. Waste from processing is piped into a tailings dam outside the city, a lake of black sludge several kilometres across, which BBC Future's 2015 report called "the worst place on Earth".
The pipes in the animation pour slurry containing acids, heavy metals and mildly radioactive thorium into the lake. Nearby villagers have reported crop failures and health problems, and Chinese authorities have since tightened environmental rules and consolidated the industry, though the legacy waste remains.
Offshore profits, low tax rates and a housing squeeze
Chart: Statista.com
In 2015, US companies held huge amounts of cash overseas, because American tax was only due when profits were brought home. Apple alone held about $158 billion abroad, and Microsoft, Oracle, Google and others followed, as the Statista chart shows. This was legal tax planning rather than illegal evasion, but it meant very low effective tax rates.
The second chart, built from New York University professor Aswath Damodaran's data on more than 7,000 listed companies, shows the gap: the internet and software sectors paid far lower effective federal rates than utilities, trucking or car retail. The rules have since changed. The 2017 US tax reform imposed a one-time tax on offshore earnings, and Apple said it would pay about $38 billion of it. In 2021, more than 130 countries backed an OECD deal for a 15 percent global minimum tax on large multinationals.
Back in California, the tech boom pushed rents in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose among the highest in the country. In 2015 the San Francisco Chronicle reported that some drivers of the private shuttle buses carrying tech staff to Silicon Valley campuses were sleeping in their cars between shifts, because they could not afford to live near their routes. Drivers later unionised and won pay rises, but the region's housing costs remain a major problem.
What has changed, and what you can do
The picture today is mixed. Big brands now publish supplier lists and audit smelters, and laws in the US and EU require minerals reporting. At the same time, demand for cobalt and rare earths has soared with electric vehicles, and another problem has grown: electronic waste. The UN-backed Global E-waste Monitor 2024 counted 62 million tonnes of e-waste generated in 2022, and only about 22 percent was documented as properly collected and recycled.
Individual buyers cannot fix global supply chains, but a few habits make a real difference:
- Keep devices longer. Most of a phone's environmental footprint comes from making it, so an extra year or two of use cuts that impact noticeably.
- Repair before replacing. Batteries and screens can be swapped, and right-to-repair rules in the EU and several US states are making parts easier to get.
- Recycle properly. Use official take-back schemes or certified recyclers rather than the household bin, so metals are recovered and toxic parts handled safely.
- Buy refurbished when you can, and look at brands' published supplier and human rights reports before you buy.
- Support pressure that works. Many of the improvements since 2015 came from journalists, NGOs and shareholders asking hard questions.
Technology has made life better in countless ways. Knowing where it comes from simply helps us pay attention to the people who make it possible.
Sources: Amnesty International, 2016: This Is What We Die For; Wikipedia: Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda; Wikipedia: Foxconn suicides; The Telegraph: A look inside the Foxconn suicide factory; BBC Future, 2015: The worst place on Earth; Statista: Biggest foreign cash reserves of US companies; San Francisco Chronicle: Tech bus drivers living in cars; Global E-waste Monitor. Original 2015 list by US Uncut.
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