Floods at Spruce Pine

What’s the connection between floods, Spruce Pine, and my phone [and probably your phone]?

Making a phone requires lots of things - people, energy, and loads of individual components, all made from raw materials. One of those components is silicon chips - and the key raw material for making chips is sand.

Spruce Pine is a place in North Carolina where most of the world’s supply of a very particular type of sand comes from - a sand that is critical in the manufacture of silicon chips, some of which end up in our phones.

Hurricane Helene has recently caused massive flooding in North Carolina. Amidst the devastation to lives and communities, the fact that Spruce Pine is currently under water and not operational is a relatively minor thing - right now, it doesn’t really matter whether they are refining sand or not … but if that is still the case in a few months time, then things might be different …

This is just one aspect of the metacrisis.

The place where the climate, global supply chains, and people overlap and interact.

NB This draws heavily on the work of Ed Conway. His Substack inspired this post, and his book Material World is a brilliant read.