How a Laptop Is Made: Materials, Components and Firmware

A laptop is made from about a dozen key materials: aluminium, magnesium or plastic for the case; silicon, copper, gold, tin and tantalum for the chips and circuit boards; lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite for the battery; glass, indium and gallium for the display and LEDs; and rare earth elements for the magnets in the speakers, fans and hinges. Those materials are mined on several continents, refined mostly in Asia, turned into parts by specialist suppliers and assembled in a few large factories. A finished laptop also carries a dozen or more pieces of firmware, from the UEFI to the embedded controller to the SSD controller, and each of them is software you have to keep updated.

This post walks the whole path: from the mine to the part, from the part to the finished machine, through testing and labels such as ENERGY STAR and EPEAT, and on to recycling. Every production figure comes from the US Geological Survey's Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, and every carbon or recycled content figure comes from a manufacturer's own published report. We describe how things are made at a conceptual level only. Nothing here is a set of instructions for refining, soldering or opening a battery.

Key takeaways

• The short answer to "what materials does a laptop need". Structural metals (aluminium, magnesium, steel), conductors (copper, gold, tin and silver in solder), semiconductors (silicon, plus gallium and indium compounds in displays and LEDs), capacitor metals (tantalum), battery materials (lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite, aluminium), glass, plastics, and rare earth magnets.
• A few countries dominate several of these materials. According to USGS, China produced an estimated 99 percent of the world's primary low purity gallium, about 82 percent of natural graphite and about 69 percent of mined rare earths in 2025. Congo (Kinshasa) supplied about 73 percent of mined cobalt.
• Batteries now drive lithium demand. USGS estimates that 88 percent of global lithium use goes into batteries, including those in portable electronics.
• Most of a laptop's carbon footprint is made before you open the box. Dell's product carbon footprint for a Latitude 5440 attributes 83.0 percent of its estimated emissions to manufacturing and 13.0 percent to four years of use.
• Recycled content is real and measurable in some models. Apple's report for the MacBook Air (M5) states 55 percent recycled content by mass, including 100 percent recycled aluminium in the enclosure and 95 percent recycled lithium in the battery.
• ENERGY STAR and EPEAT measure different things. ENERGY STAR (Version 9.0 for computers, finalised in January 2025) is about energy use. EPEAT covers climate, chemicals, circularity and responsible supply chains, with Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers.
• A laptop is a firmware supply chain too. UEFI firmware, the embedded controller, the SSD controller, the battery management chip, USB-C and Thunderbolt controllers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios and the TPM all run code from different suppliers.
• End of life starts with data and the battery. Wipe or destroy the storage, then send the laptop to a certified electronics recycler. EPA notes that most discarded lithium-ion batteries are likely hazardous waste because they can catch fire.

What materials does a laptop need? The materials and components table

The table below is the core answer. It maps each major component to the materials it is made from and the minerals behind those materials. The "where the minerals come from" column uses USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026; the following section gives the numbers.

Two points are worth stating plainly. First, no single public source gives a gram by gram bill of materials for a typical laptop, and the mix changes from one model to the next. The vendor reports we cite give recycled content and carbon figures, not full mass breakdowns. Second, many of the most important materials are present in tiny amounts. A tantalum capacitor or a film of indium tin oxide weighs very little, but there is no easy substitute for either.

Where do a laptop's minerals come from?

The US Geological Survey publishes a two page summary for each mineral commodity every year. The 2026 edition, released in February 2026, has estimates for 2025. These are the figures most relevant to a laptop.

USGS lists more producers than the table shows; we have picked the largest from each table. Lithium production figures exclude the United States because USGS withholds US data to protect company proprietary information.

Three patterns stand out. Mining is spread across many countries, but refining is far more concentrated. Several laptop materials (gallium, indium) are by-products of mining something else, which means their supply depends on aluminium and zinc markets more than on electronics demand. And export controls now apply to some of these materials, which is why the supply of a laptop can be affected by trade policy that has nothing to do with laptops.

What about "conflict minerals"?

Tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold are often grouped together because parts of their supply come from eastern Congo (Kinshasa) and neighbouring countries. USGS notes that in June 2025 the US Department of State reported a peace agreement signed by the governments of Congo (Kinshasa) and Rwanda, expected to improve stability in eastern Congo. Large electronics makers publish responsible sourcing reports for these minerals. EPEAT 2.0, covered below, includes responsible supply chains as one of its four impact areas. We do not rate individual companies here.

From mine to part: how raw materials become components

A mineral in the ground is a long way from a component on a board. The steps below are conceptual. Each one is an industry of its own.

Mining and concentration

Ore is mined from open pits, underground mines, or in the case of much of the world's lithium, from brines pumped from salt flats and evaporated. USGS notes that the only commercial scale lithium production in the United States in 2025 came from a continental brine operation in Nevada. The ore or brine is concentrated near the mine, producing a concentrate with a much higher share of the target element.

Refining and chemical processing

Concentrates are refined into metals or chemicals: lithium carbonate or hydroxide for battery cathodes, cobalt sulphate, spherical purified graphite for anodes, high purity aluminium, copper cathode, tin ingot. This is where geographic concentration is most visible. For example, USGS describes China as the world's leading producer and consumer of refined cobalt, mainly for lithium-ion batteries, even though most cobalt is mined in Congo (Kinshasa).

Making semiconductors

The Semiconductor Industry Association describes the chip value chain in four stages: research and development; design, where engineers create the blueprints; front end manufacturing, also called fabrication, which turns wafers into integrated circuits; and back end manufacturing, which assembles, tests and packages the chips. The result is a finished chip ready to be placed on a circuit board.

In practice that means a processor in your laptop may have been designed in one country, fabricated in a second, packaged and tested in a third, and soldered to a board in a fourth. Memory and flash storage follow the same pattern with different suppliers. The design stage also produces the first firmware: the boot ROM inside the chip and the microcode that later updates fix.

Making the passive parts and boards

Circuit boards are built from layers of glass fibre and epoxy with copper foil, etched into traces and drilled for vias. Capacitors, resistors and inductors are made by the billions. Displays are produced in large panel factories that deposit thin films, including the indium tin oxide conductor, on glass. Battery cells are made in cell factories, then assembled into packs with a small battery management circuit and its own firmware.

Making the mechanical parts

The chassis is either machined from aluminium, die cast from magnesium or aluminium alloy, stamped from sheet, or injection moulded from plastic. It is then finished, coloured and fitted with threaded inserts. Hinges, keyboards, trackpads and thermal modules are specialist sub-assemblies that arrive at the final factory ready to install.

What goes into each part of a laptop?

This section takes each major component in turn and explains what it does, what it is made of and what firmware it carries.

Chassis

The chassis carries the load, spreads heat and protects the board. Aluminium alloys are common because they are stiff, conduct heat and can be recycled repeatedly. Magnesium alloys are lighter for the same stiffness. Plastics are cheaper and easier to mould, and they let radio signals through, which is why many designs use plastic or glass windows over the antennas. Apple's MacBook Air (M5) report states that the enclosure uses 100 percent recycled aluminium, an example of how far recycled content can go for the largest single part.

Motherboard

The motherboard, often called the logic board or mainboard in a laptop, holds the processor, memory, power regulators, controllers and connectors. In most thin laptops it is a dense, multi-layer board with components on both sides. Unlike a desktop board, it rarely follows a standard form factor; each model has its own shape. Apple's report lists 100 percent recycled gold plating and tin solder in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards and recycled copper in multiple boards, which shows which metals matter on a board even when exact masses are not published. For the history of the board as a platform, including chipsets, UEFI and the TPM, see our post on motherboard evolution.

Processor and graphics

The processor (CPU) and graphics processor (GPU) are often on the same package or the same die in modern laptops, sometimes with a neural processing unit alongside. They are the most complex parts in the machine, with billions of transistors made on silicon wafers. They need a power delivery network of voltage regulators on the board, and they need cooling. Their firmware includes microcode updates delivered through UEFI or the operating system.

Memory

Laptop memory is either soldered directly to the board or fitted as small outline modules. Soldered memory saves space and power but cannot be upgraded or replaced on its own. The generations, from DDR4 to DDR5 and LPDDR variants, are covered in our post on memory evolution.

Storage (SSD)

Nearly all current laptops use solid state storage connected over PCI Express using the NVMe protocol. An SSD is a small computer: a controller chip running its own firmware manages the NAND flash, wear levelling, error correction and encryption. NVMe drives keep several firmware slots and report which one is active. How PCI Express got here is in our post on bus evolution.

Battery

A laptop battery is a set of lithium-ion cells with a protection and fuel gauge circuit. EPA explains that lithium-ion batteries are named for their cathode chemistry, and that lithium cobalt oxide chemistries are common in consumer electronics. Common materials include lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite and aluminium, and EPA notes that all six were on the USGS 2022 list of critical minerals. The battery management circuit reports charge, health and cycle count to the embedded controller, and on many machines it has firmware that can be updated.

Display

Most laptop displays are LCD panels with an LED backlight, with OLED panels increasingly common. Both use a thin, transparent conductive layer; USGS notes that indium tin oxide accounts for most of the world's indium consumption and is used mainly in flat panel displays. LEDs depend on gallium compounds. Apple's 2026 notes on its life cycle model put the average carbon intensity of displays at 0.16 kg CO2e per square centimetre for OLED and 0.03 kg CO2e per square centimetre for LCD, which explains why display choice moves the footprint of a product. The display has a timing controller with firmware, and touch displays add a touch controller with firmware of its own.

Keyboard and trackpad

The keyboard is a membrane or switch matrix under keycaps, read by the embedded controller rather than by the main processor. That design is why the embedded controller matters for security and reliability: it sees every key press before the operating system does. Trackpads have their own microcontroller. Apple's report lists 90 percent recycled steel in the keyboard feature plate and trackpad beam and 100 percent recycled glass in the trackpad.

Hinge

The hinge is a precision friction part, usually steel or zinc alloy, designed for tens of thousands of open and close cycles. The ribbon cables for the display, camera, microphones and antennas run through or alongside it, which makes it one of the most common points of failure in older laptops.

Thermal design

A laptop's cooling system moves heat from the processor to the outside air. The usual design is a copper heat pipe or vapour chamber that carries heat to aluminium fins, with one or two small fans. Fanless designs spread heat through the chassis instead. The embedded controller reads temperature sensors and sets fan speed and power limits, so the cooling system is also partly a firmware system.

Power adapter

Modern laptops charge over USB Type-C using the USB Power Delivery protocol, which means both the adapter and the laptop have small controllers that negotiate voltage and current. Some newer adapters use gallium nitride transistors, which is another link to gallium supply. Apple's report includes measured power adapter efficiency around 91 percent across load points for the MacBook Air (M5) adapters.

Who makes the parts? Suppliers by category

A laptop brand designs the product, specifies the parts and controls the firmware, but most physical parts come from specialist suppliers. The supply base falls into these categories. We describe categories only and do not rank companies.

The independent firmware vendor category is the one most people have never heard of, and it is the one that matters most for security. A flaw in a shared UEFI core can reach many brands at once, and each brand then has to ship its own fixed firmware.

How is a laptop assembled and tested?

Final assembly brings the board, battery, display, keyboard and chassis together. The order varies between designs, but the stages are broadly the same.

1. Surface mount assembly. Solder paste is printed onto the bare board, machines place components, and the board passes through a reflow oven that melts the solder. Boards are inspected optically and often with X-ray for hidden joints under chips.
2. Board test. In-circuit and functional tests check that the board powers up and that each part responds. The factory flashes the initial firmware images here: UEFI, embedded controller, and sometimes other controllers.
3. Provisioning. Serial numbers, product identifiers and platform keys are written. On machines with Secure Boot, the platform key and key databases are set in this stage. A mistake here, such as shipping test keys, cannot be fixed by the user.
4. System assembly. The board, thermal module, battery, speakers, display and keyboard are fitted into the chassis, with ribbon cables connected and screws or adhesive applied.
5. Burn-in and functional test. The completed laptop runs diagnostics for display, keyboard, ports, cameras, radios and battery charging, often under thermal load.
6. Operating system image. The factory image, drivers and preinstalled software are written to the SSD.
7. Final inspection, packaging and shipping. Packaging is increasingly fibre based; Apple's MacBook Air (M5) report states 100 percent fibre-based packaging.

Certification and regulation

Before a laptop can be sold, it has to meet regulatory requirements in each market. In the United States, that includes FCC equipment authorisation for its radio and unintentional emissions. Safety standards for IT equipment and transport rules for lithium batteries also apply. These rules are about emissions, safety and shipping. None of them requires a firmware inventory or a software bill of materials, which is one reason firmware tracking is still mostly a buyer's job.

Where does a laptop's carbon footprint come from?

Two manufacturer documents make the point clearly. Their methods differ, so read each on its own terms and do not compare the totals as if they were a ranking.

Dell Latitude 5440, report produced February 2023. Dell uses PAIA, a streamlined life cycle assessment tool developed with MIT's Materials Systems Laboratory. The estimate has a mean of 290 kg CO2e with a standard deviation of 58 kg, and Dell reports a range from 171 kg at the 5th percentile to 575 kg at the 95th. The assumptions are a 1.36 kg, 14 inch notebook, assembled in China, used for four years in the EU with a yearly energy demand of 19 kWh. By life cycle stage, manufacturing accounts for 83.0 percent, use 13.0 percent, transport 3.6 percent and end of life 0.5 percent.

Apple MacBook Air (M5), report dated March 2026. Apple calculates footprints to ISO 14040, 14044 and 14067 and assumes four years of use for a Mac. The 13 inch model with an 8 core GPU, 16 GB memory and 512 GB storage is listed at 119 kg CO2e, and the 15 inch model with a 10 core GPU, 16 GB and 512 GB at 145 kg CO2e. The footprint includes the product, in-box accessories and packaging.

What these documents agree on is direction: making the laptop is the largest share of its footprint. The practical conclusion is that keeping a laptop in service longer, repairing it and reusing it usually saves more than any efficiency improvement during use. Dell's wide uncertainty range is also a useful reminder that a single headline number hides a lot of variation by configuration and factory.

What do ENERGY STAR and EPEAT mean on a laptop?

ENERGY STAR

ENERGY STAR is the US EPA's energy efficiency label. The computers specification covers desktops, integrated desktops, notebooks, tablets, portable all-in-ones, thin clients and workstations. It sets a base energy allowance for each product type and adds allowances for features that use more energy, and it requires power management: the display should sleep within 15 minutes of inactivity and the system within 30 minutes. ENERGY STAR says certified computers use about 30 to 40 percent less energy than standard models.

ENERGY STAR finalised Version 9.0 of the computers specification on 8 January 2025, and its consumer page for computers lists an effective date of 27 October 2025. Manufacturers often state results against it; Apple's report, for example, says the MacBook Air (M5) uses at least 55 percent less energy than the ENERGY STAR requirement.

EPEAT

EPEAT is an ecolabel run by the Global Electronics Council. Products are registered against required and optional criteria covering the full life cycle. Bronze products meet all required criteria; Silver products meet all required criteria and at least 50 percent of the optional criteria; Gold products meet all required criteria and at least 75 percent of the optional ones. EPEAT 2.0 organises its criteria around four impact areas: climate, chemicals, circularity and responsible supply chains, and it sets requirements for the companies that make the products as well as for the products themselves.

Neither label covers firmware update support, security features or how long a vendor will patch the machine. Ask for those separately.

What firmware is inside a laptop?

A modern laptop is a network of small computers. The main processor runs your operating system, but at least a dozen other chips run their own code, and some of them start before the main processor does.

The embedded controller deserves a closer look because it is the least visible. The Chromium OS project publishes its EC code as open source, and its documentation describes a lightweight multitasking OS with modules for power sequencing, keyboard control, thermal control, battery charging and verified boot. The same documentation notes that newer Chromebook designs from July 2021 base their EC on the Zephyr RTOS, and that the same code base runs on other microcontrollers such as the fingerprint and touchpad MCUs. Most other laptops use closed EC firmware that does the same jobs.

NIST SP 800-193, Platform Firmware Resiliency Guidelines, describes the platform as the collection of hardware and firmware components needed to boot and operate a system, and organises resiliency around three functions: protecting firmware against unauthorized changes, detecting changes that happen, and recovering rapidly and securely. NIST notes that a successful attack on platform firmware could leave a system inoperable or needing reprogramming by the original manufacturer. Our post on why firmware below the OS goes unpatched explains why these updates lag in practice.

On Linux, the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) is the main channel for many of these updates. Its documentation describes it as a secure web service where OEMs upload firmware archives, and where users can download metadata about available updates and, optionally, the updates themselves. The fwupd daemon queries supported hardware for current firmware versions and installs updates using that metadata. LVFS says millions of devices are updated through it every month.

For the inventory side, our post on HBOM vs SBOM explains how hardware and software bills of materials differ and where they meet.

Step by step: read your own laptop's components and firmware

The commands below only read information. None of them changes firmware or deletes data. Run them on your own machine to build a simple record of what your laptop is made of and what firmware it runs.

1. Identify the model and firmware (Linux)

# Manufacturer, model, serial and UEFI firmware version
sudo dmidecode -t system -t bios

# Processor and memory summary
lscpu | head -20
sudo dmidecode -t memory | grep -E "Size|Type:|Speed|Manufacturer|Part Number"

2. List devices with updatable firmware (Linux)

# Every device fwupd can see, with current firmware versions
fwupdmgr get-devices

# Refresh metadata from LVFS and list available updates (read only)
fwupdmgr refresh
fwupdmgr get-updates

fwupdmgr get-devices usually shows the system firmware, the embedded controller where supported, the SSD, the TPM, docks and some USB-C controllers. A device that is missing here may still have firmware; it simply is not supported through LVFS.

3. Check the SSD's firmware and slots (Linux)

# NVMe drives, models and firmware revisions
sudo nvme list

# Firmware log page: active slot and the revision in each slot
sudo nvme fw-log /dev/nvme0

Newer nvme-cli releases (3.0 and later) mark fw-log as a deprecated alias and recommend nvme log fw instead. Both read the same log page.

4. Check the battery's health (Linux)

upower -i $(upower -e | grep -i bat)
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/cycle_count 2>/dev/null

Look at the design capacity, the current full capacity and the cycle count. A battery that has lost a large share of its capacity is a candidate for replacement by an authorised service provider, not for home disassembly.

5. The same facts on Windows (PowerShell)

# Model and firmware version
Get-CimInstance Win32_ComputerSystem | Select-Object Manufacturer, Model
Get-CimInstance Win32_BIOS | Select-Object Manufacturer, SMBIOSBIOSVersion, ReleaseDate

# Disk models and firmware revisions
Get-PhysicalDisk | Select-Object FriendlyName, MediaType, FirmwareVersion

# Signed drivers with versions, useful for radio and controller firmware packages
Get-CimInstance Win32_PnPSignedDriver | Select-Object DeviceName, DriverVersion, Manufacturer | Sort-Object DeviceName

# Battery report, written to an HTML file in the current folder
powercfg /batteryreport

6. The same facts on macOS

# Model, chip, memory and system firmware version
system_profiler SPHardwareDataType

# Battery cycle count and condition
system_profiler SPPowerDataType | grep -E "Cycle Count|Condition|Maximum Capacity"

# Storage devices
system_profiler SPNVMeDataType SPStorageDataType

7. Write it down

Store one record per laptop with the model, serial number, UEFI or system firmware version, EC version where shown, SSD model and firmware revision, battery health, TPM state and the date. When the next firmware advisory names a model or an SSD firmware revision, you can answer "which of our laptops are affected" from the record instead of from memory.

What happens at end of life?

A laptop's end of life has three jobs: protect the data, deal with the battery safely, and recover the materials.

Data first

Before a laptop leaves your hands, make sure the data on its SSD cannot be recovered. On a machine with full disk encryption that was turned on from the start, destroying the key through the operating system's reset or the drive's sanitize function makes the data unreadable. Follow your organisation's media sanitisation policy, and use the manufacturer's documented reset or the SSD's sanitize feature rather than overwriting tools designed for spinning disks. Commands that erase data are not included here on purpose; run them only from the vendor's instructions and only after confirming the exact device.

The battery

EPA explains that most discarded lithium-ion batteries are likely to be ignitable and reactive hazardous wastes because they can catch fire or explode if mishandled, and that fires at end of life are common. EPA's advice is to keep them out of household rubbish and recycling bins and take them to a battery or electronics recycling location. Do not puncture, crush or try to open a battery pack. If a battery is swollen, stop using the laptop, keep it away from flammable materials, and contact the manufacturer or an authorised service provider.

Materials recovery

EPA says that electronics are made from valuable resources, including metals, plastics and glass, and that recycling one million laptops saves energy equivalent to the electricity used by more than 3,500 US homes in a year. EPA points consumers to certified electronics recyclers and explains what certification means. USGS notes that construction of lithium battery recycling plants continued throughout 2025, and that only limited quantities of rare earths are recovered from batteries and magnets today.

Manufacturer take back programmes are another route. Apple's report says it offers or takes part in take back and recycling collection programmes in 99 percent of the countries where it sells products. Other manufacturers publish their own programmes. Reuse comes before recycling: a working laptop that is wiped and reused avoids the manufacturing footprint of a new one entirely.

Where Safeguard fits, honestly

Safeguard does not scan firmware images, read a laptop's SPI flash, check its Secure Boot keys, manage devices or generate a hardware bill of materials. It is not an endpoint protection product. Most of what this post describes, from the mine to the hinge to the embedded controller, is outside its scope.

The overlap is the software side of the supply chain. Firmware update packages, driver bundles and the tools that run on a freshly built laptop include open source components such as compression libraries, TLS libraries and parsers. When a vendor provides an SBOM for that software, Safeguard can analyse it (safeguard scan --sbom vendor-firmware-sbom.json), match its components against vulnerability databases and show which of your products and projects contain a given component and version. It also scans the code, container images and dependencies your own teams build, which is the software you can fix fastest once a laptop is rebuilt and starts pulling packages again.

Common mistakes and misconceptions

• "Laptops are mostly plastic, so materials do not matter." Many chassis are aluminium or magnesium, and the materials with the largest supply risk (gallium, indium, tantalum, cobalt, rare earths) are present in small amounts but have few substitutes.
• "Rare earths are rare." USGS notes that rare earths are relatively abundant in the Earth's crust; it is minable concentrations, and refining capacity, that are limited and concentrated.
• "Conflict minerals are only about gold." The usual group is tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, and all four are on a laptop's circuit boards.
• "Use is where a laptop's carbon comes from." Manufacturer reports put most of the footprint in manufacturing; Dell's Latitude 5440 report attributes 83.0 percent to manufacturing.
• Comparing carbon numbers across brands as if they were a ranking. Methods, boundaries, use assumptions and configurations differ. Dell reports a mean with a wide uncertainty range; Apple reports per configuration with its own model.
• Treating ENERGY STAR and EPEAT as the same thing. One measures energy; the other covers climate, chemicals, circularity and supply chains, and has tiers.
• Assuming one "BIOS update" covers all firmware. UEFI updates often bundle the EC and microcode, but the SSD, dock, Thunderbolt controller and radio firmware may come through different channels.
• Ignoring the SSD firmware. SSD controllers run complex firmware that affects reliability and encryption. Record the revision.
• Throwing a laptop or its battery in household waste. EPA warns that lithium-ion batteries cause fires in rubbish and recycling systems. Use a battery or electronics recycler.
• Recycling before wiping. Protect the data first, then recycle. Better still, reuse the laptop if it still works.

FAQ

What materials are needed to make a laptop?

Aluminium, magnesium or plastic for the case; silicon for chips; copper, gold, tin and silver for circuit boards and solder; tantalum for capacitors; lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite for the battery; glass, indium and gallium for the display and LEDs; steel for hinges and plates; and rare earth elements for magnets in speakers, fans and haptic motors.

Which rare earth metals are in a laptop?

Rare earths are used mainly in permanent magnets, such as neodymium based magnets in speakers, fan motors, haptic motors and lid magnets, and in small amounts in some display phosphors. USGS says magnets are the leading global use of rare earths. Apple's MacBook Air (M5) report states that all magnets use 100 percent recycled rare earth elements.

Where do the minerals in a laptop come from?

According to USGS figures for 2025, lithium comes mainly from Australia, China, Chile, Zimbabwe and Argentina; cobalt mostly from Congo (Kinshasa) and Indonesia; natural graphite mostly from China; rare earths mostly from China, with the United States and Australia next; tantalum mainly from Congo (Kinshasa), Rwanda, Nigeria and Brazil; and almost all primary gallium from China.

How much lithium is in a laptop battery?

No primary source we could reach states a lithium mass for a typical laptop battery, and it varies with capacity and chemistry. What USGS does say is that batteries account for about 88 percent of global lithium use. Apple's MacBook Air (M5) report states its battery uses 95 percent recycled lithium.

What is the carbon footprint of making a laptop?

It depends on the model and method. Dell's report for a Latitude 5440 gives a mean of 290 kg CO2e with a range of 171 to 575 kg, 83.0 percent from manufacturing. Apple lists 119 kg CO2e for a 13 inch MacBook Air (M5) configuration and 145 kg CO2e for a 15 inch one. The methods differ, so do not compare them directly.

What is the difference between ENERGY STAR and EPEAT?

ENERGY STAR is an EPA label for energy efficiency, with certified computers using about 30 to 40 percent less energy than standard models. EPEAT is an ecolabel from the Global Electronics Council that covers climate, chemicals, circularity and responsible supply chains, with Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers.

What firmware does a laptop have?

At minimum: UEFI system firmware, CPU microcode, the embedded controller, the SSD controller firmware, and usually firmware in the TPM, battery management chip, USB-C and Thunderbolt controllers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, touchpad and fingerprint reader. Each comes from a different supplier and may update through a different channel.

What does the embedded controller in a laptop do?

The embedded controller is a small microcontroller that handles power sequencing, the keyboard, fans and thermal limits, and battery charging. The open source Chromium OS EC documentation lists exactly these functions, plus a role in verified boot. It runs even when the main processor is off.

How do I recycle an old laptop safely?

Back up what you need, then wipe or sanitise the storage following the manufacturer's documented method. Do not remove or damage the battery yourself. Take the laptop to a certified electronics recycler or a manufacturer take back programme. EPA explains that lithium-ion batteries can start fires if they end up in household waste.

Are laptop batteries hazardous waste?

EPA says most discarded lithium-ion batteries are likely to qualify as ignitable and reactive hazardous waste. They are generally safe in use when bought from a trustworthy manufacturer and used as intended, but damaged or mismanaged batteries can catch fire, especially at end of life.

Fix it without waiting for upstream

When a laptop is rebuilt, reflashed or replaced, it pulls drivers, firmware tools, operating system packages and application dependencies again, and the firmware and driver bundles from component suppliers themselves ship open source libraries. Nothing below touches a laptop's boot chain or its embedded controller, but it keeps the open source software you build and run on that hardware current and fixed.

Whatever the vulnerability, most of the risk sits in two gaps. The first is the time between a fix being published and that fix actually running in your production builds. The second, and worse, is the time before any fix exists at all, while a maintainer works out a patch and a release schedule. Waiting through both gaps is a habit, not a requirement. Safeguard gives teams three ways to close them.

1. Autonomous remediation: pull requests, not tickets

When a fixed version exists, Safeguard's Griffin models open a tested, policy gated pull request that moves the affected dependency to the safe version. You can run it on one repository or in bulk across every project that carries the vulnerable version. Remediation covers eight categories, including dependencies, licenses, security posture and findings. Reachability analysis ranks the vulnerable code paths your application actually calls first, so the first pull requests you merge are the ones that matter most. Autonomous remediation ships switched off, with every category set to Manual, so your team decides how much runs on its own and what still needs a human approval.

2. Gold Open Source: the safe version in seconds, free

gold.safeguard.sh is free and needs no login. Search any CVE or package to see affected and fixed versions, CVSS, EPSS, CISA KEV status and a recommended safe version, or use the "Am I affected?" checker. The same data is available through a free read API, README status badges and RSS threat feeds. The safeguard-sh/gold-scan-action GitHub Action can fail a build on a known exploited vulnerability, on any known vulnerability, or never, so a version you have just removed cannot quietly come back in next week's merge.

3. Gold Registry: start from components that are already fixed

registry.safeguard.sh provides hardened, drop in replacements for upstream packages and container images. Every Gold artifact is held continuously to zero exploitable critical or high CVEs, zero malware and a completed license check, with SLSA L3 or higher provenance, a Sigstore signature and a public evidence page you can hand to an auditor. An artifact loses its Gold badge if it regresses. Teams can point their own package directory at the registry so hardened equivalents resolve without changing how developers install anything.

When upstream has no fix yet, or will not ship one, Safeguard first works to get the fix accepted upstream. If the issue is severe or upstream will not move, Safeguard builds a fork, fixes the vulnerability there and publishes a hardened Gold build, so you are not stuck on a maintainer's release schedule. You can also request a hardened, compatibility tested build of a specific package. This fork and patch flow is in early access today, so ask which packages it covers before you plan around it.

One honest limit: when the vulnerable code lives in a vendor appliance, a hosted service or an operating system runtime you do not build yourself, the fix still has to come from that vendor or distribution. The steps above apply to the open source dependencies and container images you build and ship, which is where most teams carry the largest and least tracked share of their exposure.

See how Safeguard would help

The first demo is a real terminal session with the Safeguard CLI. It reads a vulnerability finding and its advisory, asks before each command, upgrades a dependency, runs the tests with your approval and pushes nothing. The same flow applies to the projects you clone onto a new or rebuilt laptop, which pull their dependencies fresh on the first install.

Click through it at your own pace, or open it full screen.

The second demo sets up the local runner on your own machine, approves it with a device code and runs scans from the terminal. That suits a laptop you have just rebuilt, or a workstation where you want to scan a vendor supplied SBOM for a firmware or driver package without sending source anywhere else.

Click through it at your own pace, or open it full screen.

The third demo connects Claude to the Safeguard MCP server with OAuth and lets you choose which tools Claude can use. Once connected, you can ask which of your projects contain a component that a firmware or driver vendor has flagged, as long as that software is in your Safeguard inventory.

Click through it at your own pace, or open it full screen.

To try it on your own projects, download Safeguard at safeguard.sh/download and read the CLI documentation.

Quick check

Sources

• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Lithium
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Cobalt
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Graphite (natural)
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Rare earths
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Gallium
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Indium
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Tantalum
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Tin
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Copper
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Aluminum
• Apple, MacBook Air (M5) Product Environmental Report, March 2026
• Dell Technologies, Product Carbon Footprint: Dell Latitude 5440 (February 2023)
• ENERGY STAR, Computers
• ENERGY STAR, Computers Specification Version 9.0
• Global Electronics Council, EPEAT 2.0
• Global Electronics Council, EPEAT Registry
• US EPA, Electronics Donation and Recycling
• US EPA, Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling
• Semiconductor Industry Association, How are semiconductors made?
• NIST SP 800-193, Platform Firmware Resiliency Guidelines
• Chromium OS, Embedded Controller (EC) README
• LVFS documentation, Introduction
• nvme-cli documentation, nvme-fw-log

Last reviewed: 23 October 2026.