King Leopold's cell phone

Umicore has roots in actual mining. In the late 1800s, during the reign of King Leopold II, the firm mined copper in the African Congo and shipped it to a riverside smelter near Antwerp. Today the same property houses a sprawling, state-of-the-art $2 billion smelter and refinery. Here, metals are recovered and processed. Then they are sold, sometimes to Asia, where they are used to manufacture brand-new electronics. It’s a reshuffling of the colonial arrangement: an abundant resource is sent from richer countries to poorer ones, made into goods, then sent back.

-- from Jon Mooallem on The Afterlife of Cellphones.