Put Away Your Wallet: Why You Shouldn’t Buy the iPhone 5

Award-winning journalist Fran Hawthorne has been a writer or editor at Fortune, BusinessWeek, Institutional Investor, and other publications. She is the author of Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love, The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting,and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism, and books on health care and investing.

Another new
iPhone. Could you try to yawn?

Could you
actually not buy it?

Or at
least, before you pull out your wallet, think about the forced student
labor, the warlords who
benefit from mineral smuggling, the children exposed to toxic waste from old phones, and the pile of useless accessories you'll throw
out.

With its constant pitching of the
newest cool thing to replace its previous newest cool thing, Apple has always been
one of the worst violators of the environmentalist credo “reduce, reuse,
recycle.” It barely gives customers a chance to use its toys, let alone reuse,
before making the toy obsolete and unfashionable.

But with the
iPhone 5, Apple has really outdone
itself.

For
instance, customers have recently become aware that iPhones and other Apple
gizmos are made in crowded and unsafe Chinese factories where people toil 15
hours a day for barely $50 a month. That’s
bad enough. Then, just a week before the iPhone 5 went on sale, it was revealed
that the factories had dragooned students onto the assembly lines in a rush to
get the phones made on time, threatening to kick them out of school if they
demurred.

Nor has anything been done to ameliorate
the environmental problems. As with any product, making an iPhone uses up resources
for the components, ingredients, packaging, and marketing, and also uses fuel
and creates carbon emissions in the manufacturing and shipping processes. Again,
iPhones are worse than the average, because their components include dangerous
metals and ores like coltan, which is found only in endangered gorilla habitats
or in African war zones where the profits get siphoned by warlords.

Moreover,
when you throw out your old iPhone 4—even if you think you’re recycling it—most likely it will end up in a dump where little kids will poke through dangerous metals with their bare
hands, breathing in toxic fumes, to scavenge a few pennies’ worth of metal they
can sell.

And with the
iPhone 5, Apple has added to its garbage pileup and waste by redesigning the
connector on the phone’s base precisely so that most of your old charging
cords, docks, iPhone-compatible clock radios, and other add-ons will no longer
fit. Into the garbage go all that rubber, metal, and plastic. Out of your
wallet comes $30 for a special Apple adapter plus money to replace the
accessories that still won’t work on the adapter.

Okay then,
here’s an idea: Your iPhone 4S is less
than a year old. How about sticking with it just one more year—until the
iPhone 6 comes out?

Photo of iPhone from Bigstock.