Have a look at their impact report. They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff.
I’ve looked through their report and I can’t find this info. The only thing I’ve found is a ~€2 bonus per phone to their factory workers, which is only a small fraction of a phones supply chain. Can you provide a more detailed reference supporting your claim?
squaresinger@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Read through the whole report, sum up all the money they mention. It comes out to $16 000. Double that for the stuff where they don’t mention money (because they surely would mention anything that costs more than the things they do mention). Double it again, for a safety margin. Double it again, because we are really generous. Now we are at €128 000. Divide that by the number of devices sold in 2024 and you get $1.24. Now add the $1.20 (Page 29) they pay as a living wage bonus and you arrive at $2.44 per device.
And now let’s be super generous and double that guess again, and you end up with the <€5 per device that I quoted above.
The picture becomes clearer when you look at what they say about their fair material usage.
Take for example the FP5 (page 42 & 67). Their top claim here is “Fair materials: 76%”, which they then put a disclaimer next to it, that they only mean that 76% of 14 specific focus materials is actually fair. On the detail page (page 67) they specify that actually only 44% of the total weight of the phone is fairly mined, because they just excluded a ton of material from the list of “focus materials” to push up the number.
The largest part of these materials are actually recycled materials (37% of the 44% “fair” materials). The materials they are recycling are plastics, metals and rare earth elements. That’s all materials that are cheaper to recycle than to mine. You’ll likely find almost identical amounts of recycled materials in any other phone, because it makes economical sense. It’s just cheaper. Since these materials cost nothing extra to Fairphone, we can exclude them from the list, which leaves 1% of actually fair mined material (specifically gold), and 6% of materials that they bought fairwashing credits for.
Also, the raw materials of phones are dirt cheap compared to the end price. The costly part is not mining the materials, but manufacturing all the components.
With only 1% of the materials being fairly mined and only 6% being compensated with credits, you can start to see why in total they spend next to nothing on fair mining/fair credits.
__dev@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Thanks for the detailed reply. You saying that “They themselves claim that they don’t spend more than €5 per phone on fair trade or environmental stuff” is a complete lie. It’s not a number they’re claiming, it’s a number you’ve estimated. And lets be clear: what you’ve done is take $3k in gold credits plus $13k cobalt credits and multiplied that by an arbitrary 8x.
I think you’ve gone into your analysis with a foregone conclusion. There simply isn’t enough information to say anything about the cost overheat of being “fair”.
And yet the FP4 was significantly less recycled. Plastic is certainly not cheaper to recycle; that’s a lie the plastic industry’s been pushing for a while.
xvapx@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yeah, I see, thanks a lot for taking the time to read through the report and write this.
It’s fucking sad but honestly thanks for pointing it out, I hadn’t even read the report.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yeah, it is sad. Turns out, Fairphone is just yet another fairwashing company. People spend lots of money and suffer through using this phone with its trash quality software because they think that they are saving the planet by doing so, and in the end they actually just indirectly donated maybe a few Euros to some random fair credit mill.
Keep your eyes peeled and read what’s beind the marketing, because even companies that look good rarely are.
Especially for stuff like fair/eco/green, where it’s really hard to objectively measure how good something is and where legal standards are ridiculously low.