And this in light of research that shows the use of a smartphone type of cellphone causes the same electrical load as two refrigerators. This takes into consideration charging of the phone, the power used by the towers, the servers, and the network to deliver the average amount of data per user.
It does not take into consideration the electrical load due to the manufacture of the phone or the mining, manufacturing and shipping of the components or the phone itself, or the devices involved in delivering data to that phone. This type of information is virtually impossible to calculate as it turns out. However I do know of one study from 1990 that showed the manufacturing impact to the environment of one 286 desktop, keyboard, mouse and 14" CRT monitor was equal the the manufacturing impact of six 1965 Cadillacs, and even including the lifetime impact of operating those six Cadillacs (gas, oil, repairs) still did not equal the environmental penalty of manufacturing the computer and operating it over it's lifetime.
That type of study is too complex to perform today ... way too many inputs and extreme difficulty in measuring the impact of each input ... but it can be determined that a modern day smartphone has a greater manufacturing environmental impact than that 1990 desktop system, and thus those six Caddies.
Virtually anything made from plastic has a higher environmental impact than virtually anything made of metal.
