Inside a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bas van Abel is shown in a picture. He’s not there to get something from you. He’s there to find out how much it costs in real people to make the thing you’re holding in your pocket right now.
That question, “Can a smartphone be made without leaving a trail of exploitation behind it?” is one that most people in the tech industry would rather not ask out loud. Van Abel started the Dutch company Fairphone over ten years ago. The company announced the Fairphone 6 in June 2025. It was their most powerful phone yet, and it cost €599 in Europe and $899 in the US. The specs are good: a 50MP camera, support for 5G, 8GB RAM, a battery that can be replaced, and modular parts that you can swap out yourself. But that’s not really the point. What the phone is made of, how it’s made, and who made it are what matters.
The founder of Fairphone freely admits that the company is not innocent, which is very different from the norm in the industry. Van Abel has said, “If we make phones, we destroy stuff.” This is a very interesting statement for the owner of a smartphone company to make. He grew up in Nijmegen, which is the oldest city in the Netherlands. He got interested in technology through the Waag Society, a non-profit organization where he worked for ten years to study how consumer electronics are linked to bigger problems in society. He learned about minerals that cause war. He found out that factory wages don’t pay the rent. He made up his mind to do something awkward about it.
He started a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 for what he called “the world’s first ethical smartphone.” 25,000 people pre-ordered it before the phone even came out. Some people paid over €300 for something that might not come. He says that everyone in the business told him that no one cared. It turns out they were wrong, but it’s still unclear how much the public really cares, which is probably the biggest question mark surrounding Fairphone’s whole project.
There is a screwdriver that comes with the Fairphone 6. That one small thing says more than any press release ever could. You don’t have to throw away the phone when the battery dies or the camera module breaks because it is modular. You change the part. Forty percent of the plastic case is recycled. The cobalt in the battery comes from the Fair Cobalt Alliance, which van Abel helped to set up to make mines safer places to work and keep track of where things come from. He is the first person to say that the supply chain isn’t perfect. Still, the minerals come from places where there is war. But there are programs in place that keep an eye on things and fight for better pay and safer working conditions.
It seems like what Fairphone is really selling is a new way of thinking about how we buy things. Since 2007, Apple has sold more than two billion iPhones. It’s likely that Fairphone has sold more than 200,000 units. That is a big difference that does matter. But it also shows that people are willing to pay more for a phone that was made with a conscience. “”Someone with a spade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the first person who buys new things,” van Abel said. “Once you realise that, you’ll see how special it is that we can turn a bunch of rocks into a phone.”
It comes with a warranty that lasts for five years and software updates that last for eight years. In a world where phones are made to feel old after only two years, that is really unusual. It’s still not clear if a company this big can make a difference in a field dominated by companies worth trillions of dollars. But it’s hard not to notice that the conversation has moved slightly toward Fairphone, and that a man who used to say he didn’t want a cell phone may have made one worth keeping.
