Around 1.5 million smartphones are sold worldwide every year and recent estimates suggest there are nearly as many smartphones as people on the planet.

Containing around 80% of the naturally occurring elements on the periodic table, ranging from lithium in the battery, to gallium in the electronics and rare earth elements: praseodymium and europium in the touch screen. These elements may not be familiar to you, and there is a good reason for that!

For this interactive activity we have crushed and dissolved several smart phones and measured their chemical composition in our laboratories in the School of Ocean and Earth Science.

Expect to see:
- the composition of the smart phones;
- some quizzes about what each element is used for;
- the geological processes involved in the concentration of the elements into deposits suitable for extraction;
- specimens of rocks containing mineralisation of the elements of interest, and
- microscopes with rock sections that you can interact with!