The more than 2 billion iPhones sold since Apple launched it exactly 12 years ago have done a lot of good for their owners, but it seems like they’ve been bad news for the planet. Building that many devices requires a lot of metal, plastic, glass, and other natural resources. Some of them, including cobalt, are mined by hand, reportedly sometimes by children, in desperately poor countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Others, like rare-earth elements, are in comparatively short supply. A project of the European Chemical Society found a “serious threat” that humanity could run out of many of these elements within a century.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Andrew McAfee is the cofounder of MIT's Initiative on the Digital Economy and author of More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next, to be published in October of 2019 by Scribner.

All those phones also require a lot of electricity, most of which is generated by burning fossil fuels around the world. By one estimate, a data-hungry user’s smartphone can consume as much electricity in a year as their fridge does. The “digital economy,” of which the iPhone and its kin have become an integral part, uses about 10 percent of the planet’s total electricity. Steve Jobs advised us to “make a little dent in the Universe,” but it feels like the devices introduced by his company and others have made a big dent in the overall health of our planet.

But some important measures don’t support this gloomy view. Total electricity use in the US, for example, has been essentially flat for almost a decade. For decades prior to the Great Recession, plastics consumption in the US grew more than 50 percent faster than the overall economy did, but since 2009 the situation has reversed, with plastic use growing almost 15 percent slower than the economy as a whole.

For most other natural resources, the growth rate of consumption hasn’t just slowed down; it’s actually gone negative. Year after year, the US is generally using less total steel, copper, gold, fertilizer, water, cropland, timber, paper, and other physical building blocks of an economy. And there’s not much evidence that markets think shortages are looming; prices for rare-earth elements, for example, remain far below their recent peaks.

These changes have not come about because of globalization or outsourcing. The US remains an industrial powerhouse, responsible for about 25 percent of the global economy. So what’s going on? How is it that the country changed course and learned to tread more lightly on the earth over time?

Steve Cichon, a “writer, historian, and retired radio newsman,” got a clue in 2014 when he paid $3 for a stack of old Buffalo News newspapers. On the back page of the February 16, 1991, issue was an ad from the electronics retailer Radio Shack. Cichon noticed something striking about the ad: “There are 15 electronic gizmo type items on this page … 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.”

The “gizmo type” items that had vanished into the iPhone that Cichon kept in his pocket included a calculator, camcorder, clock radio, mobile telephone, and tape recorder. And while the ad didn’t include a compass, camera, barometer, altimeter, accelerometer, or GPS device, these too have vanished into the iPhone and other smartphones.

Cichon’s find shows us that when thinking about their overall impact on the planet, it’s not helpful to think in isolation about producing 2 billion iPhones. Instead, we should think about a counterfactual: What would have been produced over the past 12 years in a smartphone-free world? The answer, clearly, is a lot more: a lot more gear, and a lot more media.

Sales of point-and-shoot cameras, camcorders, film, and videotapes have plummeted in recent years, but that’s not because we stopped caring about pictures and videos. Instead, it’s because a device called the smartphone came along that let us dematerialize our consumption of these things. Dematerialization is an idea that goes back at least to the 1920s (with R. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of “ephemerialization”), and evidence from the US and other high-income countries shows that it’s an idea whose time has finally come.

Why now? There are two causes, the first of which is technological progress. The ever-more powerful and popular iPhone is the poster child for this progress, but the technologies of dematerialization are all over the place. Computer-aided design enables thinner aluminum cans, lighter buildings, and more fuel-efficient engines. Sensors and machine learning allow energy-intensive facilities to be run more efficiently. Precision agriculture lets farmers increase crop tonnage while using less land, water, and fertilizer. These technologies do require a lot of electricity in aggregate, but they also save a lot of energy throughout the economy. This is why US electricity consumption is flatlining and total energy use is scarcely higher than it was before the recession began.