An iPhone gets pulverized in the name of science. Photo: University of Plymouth

iPhone Smoothie Reveals its Environmental Footprint

Scientists stick an iPhone in a blender to see what it’s made of.

If you wish to find out what’s in an iPhone, you’ll need to destroy it. Step 1: choose an iPhone 4S, not an expensive iPhone X. CAUTION! Remove the battery. Then, if you’re a research duo at the University of Plymouth, you don safety glasses and stick the smartphone in a blender.

After some processing and analysis, here’s what the iPhone smoothie revealed:

More interesting to the researchers were some of the less abundant but more precious elements they found:

Gold: 36 milligrams (0.001 ounces). A typical 14-karat gold ring has about 2.5 ounces of gold.

Silver: 90 mg (0.003 ounces). An old-timey U.S. silver dollar had about 0.77 ounces of silver.