The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  “I’d guess some of the phones ‘fall off the trucks’ at factories around here; some of them are from Hong Kong or sourced internationally,” Minter says, “and a few of them might come from Guiyu.”

  Which brings us to e-waste.

  Not long ago, Guiyu was an actual toxic wasteland. Just a few hours west of Shenzhen, it was the Wild West-ish e-waste capital of the world and the site of a serious environmental health crisis. Due largely to its proximity to Hong Kong, which is infamous for its vaguely regulated ports—it’s sort of like the Swiss bank account of the shipping industry—Guiyu has become, starting decades ago, a dumping ground for the world’s unwanted consumer electronics.

  At a stall in a new, half-built complex just off Guiyu’s main road, circuit boards, wires, and chips spill out of thin plastic bags, some of which stand four or five feet tall. There are piles of computer guts, monitors, and plastic casings spread out on the concrete. Men and women squat over them, sorting and picking them apart. We walk farther into the industrial complex, where garage doors open to towering walls of still more circuit boards, large and small, the internal kits of desktops and mobile handsets alike.

  A man runs out and tells us to stop taking pictures. Another walks by with a wry smile, a stack of circuit boards slung over his shoulders, a lit cigarette between his lips.

  To understand why this place exists, we need to go back even farther: In the 1970s and 1980s, as plastic, lead, and toxic-chemical-filled electronics were hitting the consumer market in quantities never before seen, disposing of them became a serious concern. Landfills stuffed with cathode-ray tubes and lead circuit boards (lead solder used to be ubiquitous) posed environmental threats, and citizens of rich countries began to demand environmental controls on e-waste disposal. Those controls, however, led to the rise of the “toxic traders,” who bought the e-waste and shipped it to be dumped in China, Eastern Europe, or Africa.

  In 1986, one such cargo vessel, the Khian Sea, was loaded with fourteen thousand tons of incinerator ash from Philadelphia. The ship sailed to the Bahamas, where it attempted to dump the waste but was turned away. It spent the next sixteen months looking for a place to unload its toxic cargo, trying the Dominican Republic, Panama, Honduras, and elsewhere, and trying unsuccessfully to return it to Philadelphia before unloading four thousand tons of it on Haiti, telling the government that it was “topsoil fertilizer.” When Greenpeace told Haitian officials the truth, they demanded the Khian Sea reload the waste, but the ship escaped. The dark tragicomedy of the incident drew international attention, as the ship tried to rename itself—first the Felicia, then the Pelicano—and continued to court countries to take the remaining waste. Eventually, the ship’s captain dumped the remaining ten thousand tons of toxic waste into the open ocean. The ensuing outrage helped spur the formation of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal in 1989, which would be signed by 185 nations and ratified by all but, you guessed it, the United States. (And, weirdly, Haiti.) The convention was an effort to prevent what was increasingly called “toxic colonialism” by the victims, and e-waste fell under its purview.

  If the ship hadn’t been turned away in the Bahamas, this particular winding road of waste subcontractors might never have caught anyone’s eye. The city of Philadelphia paid Joseph Paolino and Sons, under a six-million-dollar contract, to dispose of the waste, which that company then handed off to Amalgamated Shipping Company, which was registered in Liberia. At some point in the fiasco, another company, Coastal Carrier, took over operations. The point being, there is a tangled chain of contractors, subcontractors, and foreign companies that make it difficult to track where waste goes after it leaves American homes. For that reason, even today, the Basel Convention remains difficult to enforce.

  That brings us back to Guiyu, where similar chains of toxic traders had routed a steady stream of e-waste from around the world to Hong Kong, then to the small Chinese city a couple hundred miles away. This continued well into the 2000s. Recycling and waste-disposal companies in rich countries, it turned out, were offloading their gadgetry garbage onto a site a couple hundred miles from Shenzhen where there’s a good chance they were initially assembled.

  A Seattle-based nonprofit called the Basel Action Network revealed in 2001 that goods from the United States and Europe had a tendency to end up in the midsize town of Guiyu, where migrant workers were breaking down the gadgets by hand, mixing them in acid baths to remove traces of precious metals, and cooking the circuit boards over coal fires to remove the lead solder. The nearby river ran black with electronic ash, the fields were charred from plastic burning, children were found to have dangerously high levels of lead in their bloodstreams, and miscarriages were rampant.

  Today, the driver tells me, they farm rice on the fields they used to burn computers on. It’s true that from the main road into town, few of the horror stories seemed to present themselves. As we get closer, there is a large, multicolored billboard trumpeting plans for a new waste-recycling plant. After years of bad press, it appears that the local government is determined to overhaul the town’s image.

  Instead of letting hundreds of migrants workers burn circuit boards in the open fields, officials created a complex to handle the recycling and metal extraction: an industrial smelter to melt down the wares, and organized stalls that recyclers could rent to more safely break down the electronics. Which is where we’d ended up. The complex was still under construction and only half occupied, though the garages there were packed. This is because, the driver says, many of the former recyclers didn’t want to pay rent, so they scattered into more informal operations, behind closed doors, some in town and some on its outskirts. He hints that the government’s plan was largely cosmetic, that many of the same activities and their risks persisted, but they’d been swept out of sight.

  Which is a pretty good metaphor for the state of e-waste in general. E-waste is an ever-sharper thorn in the technology industry’s side. Driven in part by the iPhone-led smartphone boom, which has put complex electronics into more hands than ever before, e-waste continues to be a global blight. For Americans, the lure of dumping it abroad is great—breaking down today’s devices is tedious, time-consuming work, and many of the materials aren’t valuable.

  “There really isn’t much in there,” David Michaud, the metallurgist who pulverized my iPhone, told me, noting that there’s been a lot of talk of recycling the phone for its metals but that it may not be worth the cost of recycling. “You’d need a lot of iPhones to recycle.”

  In 2016, Apple rolled out Liam, a slick, twenty-nine-armed recycling robot that can rapidly disassemble and sort iPhones into component parts. Apple says Liam is optimized to recycle up to 1.2 million phones a year but nonetheless characterizes the robot as “an experiment” intended to inspire other companies tackling e-waste, and it’s unclear what role it will play in the company’s long-term operations.

  BAN completed another study in 2016; in it, the group teamed with MIT to place GPS sensors in over a hundred electronics submitted to accredited, well-respected e-waste recyclers in the United States, like the Goodwill. Surprise: The majority of them ended up shipped overseas, long after the negative press from exported electronics spurred companies and regulators to try to assert more control over the e-waste-recycling process. Most of the electronics went to Hong Kong. One shipment wound up in Kenya. E-waste-recycling companies that say they’re responsibly supervising the landfill-free recycling of American gadgets are still offloading them to China and Africa. Granted, there’s a demand for the goods there, where the market for secondhand phones extends even further, and skilled repair workers can revive discarded devices.

  “About 41.8 million metric tonnes of e-waste was generated in 2014 and partly handled informally, including illegally,” a 2016 UN report, “Waste Crimes,” noted. “This could amount to as much as USD $18.8 billion annually. Without sustainable management, monitoring and good governance o
f e-waste, illegal activities may only increase, undermining attempts to protect health and the environment, as well as to generate legitimate employment.”

  I didn’t see much evidence of good governance at Guiyu—there was no fancy machinery in sight and no protective gear for the workers, who were still breaking it down and sorting it by hand. Instead of squatting in fields and burning circuit boards, they were squatting on concrete and burning them behind closed doors—in a facility we weren’t allowed to see—and paying extra for the privilege. We had tea with a local city official, who told us that the plans were not complete and would not be for a year yet.

  At least the river wasn’t running black, and there were no open flames in sight.

  As we drove through town, we saw a building with thousands of tiny microchips scattered out front on the dirty pavement. We stopped, and a crowd of young men in dusty T-shirts looked at us quizzically.

  “You want to buy?”

  I said sure, I’d take one, picking up the microchip and putting it in my palm. He laughed.

  “Keep it.”

  Today, e-waste gathers everywhere, a by-product of the flood of devices, like the iPhone, and the rate they’re disposed of. After Guiyu was reined in, reports pegged Ghana’s Agbogbloshie dump site as the new “biggest e-waste dump in the world.” But Minter says it’s the same story everywhere. E-waste flows have grown complex and diffuse, in no small part because the markets for devices have too.

  “Honestly, just look at the massive dumps outside of any major city in a developing, less regulated place,” Minter tells me in Shenzhen. “Go to Kenya, go to Mombasa, go to Nairobi.” Some of the best device-repair technicians Minter has ever seen, he says, can be found there. And the waste dumping is no longer the “toxic colonialism” of yore. Some African and Asian companies are eager to import working secondhand phones. Usually not iPhones, but Android phones and even the cheap Chinese knockoffs will find a second life in African or South Asian markets.

  So I decided to try to travel as far downstream as I could. If peeking into a tin mine in Bolivia helped contextualize the origins of the iPhone, perhaps a dump site in a rapidly developing mobile-friendly nation like Kenya could help contextualize its final resting place.

  I headed to Dandora, Nairobi’s infamous dump, the largest in East Africa. The only way some of the residents of Dandora can get their hands on smartphones is if they dig them out of its churning heaps of decomposing garbage. There are plenty there for the taking too—if you can spot them and root them out. Waste of every kind—from the city and the entire region, from its international airport, and from wealthier countries that have exported their waste—ends up there. Opened in 1975 with World Bank funds, it was declared filled in 2001. But despite city officials repeatedly announcing its imminent closure, some 770,000 tons of industrial, organic, and electronic waste continue to pile up there each year.

  The results are predictable—a waste dump that has overflowed for so long that it’s become a permanent feature of both the neighborhood it lends real estate to, and the landscape itself.

  The smell hits you first, of course; it’s the smell of rotting foodstuffs, of spewing methane, of stagnant air and decay.

  It’s truly massive; hills of garbage roll as far as you can see. Ghoulish, teenager-size storks swoop around scouting for food or stand sentry to the trash.

  Three thousand people work in the dump site every day; it’s the major job creator for the local economy. They’re expert frontline recyclers, and they’re looking for everything: basic raw materials like plastic, glass, and paper for recycling; metals like aluminum and copper; and valuable e-waste that can be refurbished and resold. Phones, especially smartphones, are a big draw. If the phones are still intact—many are—pickers take them to the nearby stalls of electronics salespeople; if they’re not, they strip out the batteries, motherboards, and copper bits for scrap.

  Structures are built directly atop the garbage, which has become a foundation for homes and shops. One building has a skull and crossbones drawn on the door.

  “People are born here and die here,” Mboma, an actor, club-runner, and volunteer who was himself born and raised in Dandora, said. I’d met him through friends of a colleague, and he’d offered to show me around. “Some people, all they know is this garbage.”

  It’s a brutal place. The towering garbage hills smolder, emitting noxious gases, and pools of toxic waste collect between them. Those who work here have no protection of any kind and are exposed to the pollution day in and day out. The day I visited, a boy, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, had fallen asleep near the entrance to the site, on the trash-packed road. The driver of the first dump truck to arrive—here they’re giant vehicles with conveyor tracks for wheels—didn’t see him in time. The truck ran over him, crushing him. Because the Dandora dump site is off the local municipality’s radar, police and officials don’t visit here or tend to accidents. So the body lay there all day.

  My guide told me about the tragedy halfway through our walk around the site; we had passed right by his body at the entrance. There he was, when we returned, covered by a torn piece of cardboard, a pool of viscous blood under his still head.

  One of the dump’s informal stewards, a young man named T.J., didn’t look a day older than twenty-two, but he was apparently a man of some power; the dumps are dangerous but lucrative, so organized cartels control who goes in and out.

  “These are good money,” he says, bending over and pulling out a basically intact cell phone. He said that they’re among the most sought-after items out there. They’re often repairable and can be resold in the nearby shops.

  I found a Huawei whose touchscreen looked a little melted but could otherwise be usable—T.J. told me screens were hard to repair, since the parts were so scarce and thus my find might not be all that valuable. The full-timers had already found a Nokia body and a frayed BlackBerry. Back in Dandora, such a phone can fetch five hundred shillings (five dollars, but that’s a month’s rent here), whether it’s working perfectly or not.

  “Everything is negotiable,” says Wahari, a seller who’s been hocking wares in Dandora for twenty-five years and is the host of one of the biggest selections of used smartphones in town.

  And even here, demand drives a significant market.

  “There are two status symbols here,” Kinyamu, the entrepreneur, told me. “First, a car. If you can afford a car, you get a car to show you are successful. But second, it is a smartphone.”

  Indeed, even in Dandora, which many would consider a slum, with its hovels and mud floors and tenuous access to electricity, I see plenty of distracted older youth go by toting smartphones and thumbing screens as they wind through the pedestrian paths, dodging children and sliced-watermelon vendors and crowds gathered outside the packed theater where a soccer game is playing.

  It’s almost all Android phones. There are a few Apple resellers in Nairobi, but the iPhone is still a luxury here, where it’s well known, but rarely seen.

  “An iPhone is the ultimate status symbol for a businessman to bring into a boardroom—actually, now it’s an iPad.”

  Wahari, the Dandora recycled-goods salesman, says once in a while they’ll find an iPhone out in the dump site.

  “Oh, it’s very rare,” he says with a laugh, and he shakes his head. “Very rare. But it happens, and that is a good day. It is the gold mine.”

  There are few places around the globe that remain untouched by the influence of the iPhone. Even where it’s an aspirational device, it has nonetheless driven mass adoption of smartphones built in its likeness and kindled, yes, a nearly universal desire, as Jon Agar put it.

  Now, a last step remains before we can successfully reassemble that gold mine and understand that one device.

  Once all of the parts and pieces we’ve explored in this book had been laid out, so to speak, in various places around the world, those materials and technologies, they had to be pinpointed, collected, improved, and artfully innova
ted by Apple.

  This is the story of how that finally happened.

  iV: The One Device

  Purple reign

  The Purple Dorm, aka Fight Club, aka 2 Infinite Loop, second floor, was packed. The aging office space—Apple’s HQ was built in the early nineties, and purple and teal accents dotted the halls—had become a hub of activity. The conference rooms in the wing were cheekily named—Between, Rock, and Hard Place, for example. Another was called Diplomacy, which was where Christie’s crew banged out the new UI. Fishbowl was the main conference room, where Steve Jobs was a weekly presence.

  By 2006, the basic contours of the iPhone project had been defined. Members of the Mac OS team and the NeXT mafia would engineer the software; the Human Interface team would work closely with them to improve, integrate, and dream up new designs; and the iPod team would wrangle the hardware. A team was working day in and day out to identify and strip lines of code from Mac OS to make it fit on a portable device. The famed ID group had set about perfecting the form factor. And Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, and Greg Christie’s old office space had become the gravitational center of the project.