Raw materials in your laptop

Sometimes, I wish I had a pair of glasses that would allow me to view objects as the raw resources they consist of.

The industrial economy makes it easy to forget that devices we purchase online—or the food we buy in the supermarket—didn't simply materialize in a warehouse one day. Everything we use and consume is made out of materials that are grown or mined.

Resources are then refined and altered, engineers and designers use these materials to create a functional product, and a team of people and robots put it together before shipping it around the world. Your devices passed through the hands of hundreds, if not thousands, of people before making it to you.

So, put on my glasses and gawk at the raw materials in your laptop.

The visual is based on research by HP and assumes a 1.7-kilogram notebook. Every sphere is sized according to the mass of the material and the corresponding material density.

Note:

In order to organize and simplify the graphic, I put together different types of glass under the header "Glass" and different types of plastic under the header "Plastics". I also deconstructed lithium cobalt oxide to separately visualize lithium and cobalt.