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Abubakar buys and sells all manner of e-waste, but he specializes in mobile phones. It’s a solid twenty-first-century business. All over the developing world, mobile phones have become as common as T-shirts. There is just shy of one registered mobile account for every single one of Nigeria’s 220 million people. “Everybody has a phone. Not everybody has a computer,” he says. “What do I see here?” he asks, waving a hand at the room full of workers and gutted mobiles. “I’m the only one with a computer. I don’t know whether any of these people have a computer. But I know all of them have a phone.” 

Those phones, like all phones, eventually wear out, break down, or get tossed by owners eager for a newer model. Worldwide, in 2022, an estimated 5.3 billion mobile phones were thrown out. If you stacked them all up, the pile would reach one eighth of the way to the Moon. 

Abubakar deploys a vast network of buyers and pickers to seek out discarded phones all over Nigeria, as well as in neighboring countries and, occasionally, as far away as France. The phones and other e-waste arrive by truck, by train, and in sacks carried by workers like Anwar. All day long, they tramp into the muddy courtyard next to Abubakar’s building, where more workers weigh their sacks of electronic scrap on a digital scale. The bigger items, like computer towers and wireless routers, are stashed in a tinroofed shed. On the day I visited, three men were hunched on a concrete pad by the shed, smashing phones apart with hammers and prying out their circuit boards like meat from a crab shell. 

At the beginning of the phones’ lives, these precisely engineered products were manufactured under ultra-clean conditions in sophisticated, high-tech factories; now, at their end, they are being torn apart by hand on a grimy concrete pad. It’s an oddly disturbing sight, perhaps because phones are more intimately connected to us than, say, toasters. Every one of these phones must have been held for hours in someone’s hands, sat for days in someone’s pocket or purse, a constant digital companion. There’s something jarring about seeing their viscera ripped out like this. 

All told, Abubakar says, he has about five thousand people working for him, bringing in millions of phones each year. I express polite skepticism at this figure. Without changing his expression, Abubakar rises from his desk and gestures for me to follow him through a door in the back of the office. He leads me into a warren of rooms, all of them filled either with enormous sacks stuffed with phones, people cracking and sorting phones, or bales of circuit boards ready for shipping. The urban-mining label fits. It’s an inversion of the industrial order: Workers digging through piles of manufactured products to produce raw materials, rather than the other way around. 

The main components buyers want are printed circuit boards, the thin panels of (usually) green plastic or fiberglass found in everything from kids’ toys to medical devices. The boards are etched with copper pathways that carry signals between the soldered-on chips, capacitors, and other parts. 

Abubakar’s workers break the chips off the boards for further assessing; if they still work, they can be sold separately for use in refurbished phones. On his own phone, Abubakar pulls up an eye-crossing list of hundreds of chip serial numbers and their corresponding prices. He shows me a lunchbag-sized sack of Android chips. The serial numbers printed on them are so tiny I can barely make them out. “In dollars, this bag is worth around $35,000,” he says. The cameras, which are just the little lens you see on the phone’s back attached to a strip of metal foil inside it, can also be extracted and sold separately. A sack of those is also worth quite a bit. Abubakar keeps security cameras trained on his workers to make sure nobody pockets anything—cameras watching people extracting cameras. He fired someone the week before for stealing some chips.

Excerpted from Chp 9 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.