Buying Used Tech This Holiday Season Can Avert Human Rights Abuses

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December 19, 2023

New cell phones and other electronics are popular holiday gifts. But they also contain heavy metals like cobalt and copper, the demand for which is fueling humanitarian crises in the countries where they are mined. Holding off on purchasing the latest iPhone or choosing a refurbished device avoids the extraction of around 180 pounds of raw materials, according to recent reports. And if everyone in the U.S. kept their phone for an extra year on average, that would cut the manufacturing demand by more than 40 million pounds of raw materials per day. This week's top story has really helpful tips for buying used and refurbished electronics. Read more below. This newsletter will be taking a break next week for the holidays. See you in 2024!

Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor @AGawrylewski

Electronics Buying Used Tech This Holiday Season Can Avert Human Rights Abuses Here's how to buy ethical tech and keep conflict minerals in the ground By Molly Glick

Policy Do Video Doorbells Really Prevent Crime? More people are using doorbell cameras and sharing the footage with the police, but there are few data showing their effectiveness By Rod McCullom,Undark

Climate Change Electric Vehicle Owners Are Not Driving Enough--And That's Bad Used car buyers and the U.S. government need to dive into the marketplace to deliver the emissions reductions promised by electric vehicles By John Paul Helveston

Defense This Filipina Physicist Helped Develop a Top Secret Weapon Emma Unson Rotor worked on the proximity fuze, a groundbreaking piece of World War II weapons technology that the U.S. War Department called "second only to the atomic bomb." By Erica Huang,The Lost Women of Science Initiative

Artificial Intelligence How To Keep AI From Stealing the Sound of Your Voice A new technology called AntiFake prevents the theft of the sound of your voice by making it more difficult for AI tools to analyze vocal recordings By Silke Hahn,Gary Stix

Behavior Technology Is Secretly Stealing Your Time. Here's How to Get It Back Technology is supposed to save us time, right? Turns out, it's stealing some of our most precious time, but it's not too late to get it back By Ruth Ogden,Joanna Witowska,Vanda Černohorská,The Conversation US

Engineering Inside the Satellite Tech Revealing Gaza's Destruction Amid restrictions on optical satellite images, researchers have developed a radar technique to gauge building damage in Gaza By Lauren Leffer

QUOTE OF THE DAY "Anything we do that keeps devices in use longer ... reduces the amount of minerals that are needed." Lucas Gutterman, director of the nonprofit U.S. Public Interest Research Group's (PIRG's) Designed to Last campaign against e-waste and planned obsolescence.

FROM THE ARCHIVE Efforts to Slow Climate Change Could Inadvertently Create Humanitarian Crises In promoting renewable energy, wealthier nations could worsen health, housing and labor problems in the developing nations where materials are sourced By Marx Itabelo Lwabanya,James Huang | December 2023

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