Yeah we haven’t seen a “green” mobile phone yet
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080619/tc_pcworld/147315
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“More than half the world’s population now own a phone” was a typical headline.
To give you some idea, in the time it’s taken you to read this paragraph, another 3,000 or 4,000 phones will have been sold. Nokia alone is reported to sell in the region of 17 phones per second.
Let’s face it: 3 billion phones represent a lot of plastic.
The raw material alone needed to produce 3 billion phones is far from insignificant.
Essential ingredients such as coltan, which can be mined by hand and is
in plentiful supply in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo,
has been blamed for helping fuel the civil war, increasing child labor
rates, fostering illegal encroachment into national parks and the
deaths of endangered gorillas. Once you have the ingredients, there is
the shear amount of energy required in the manufacturing process and
concerns about the working conditions in the factories. And, at the end
of all that, there is the carbon emitted in shipping the finished
products, usually by air.
Mobiles that do end up in the ground have the potential to come back to
haunt the owner, and millions of other people, as toxic chemicals
slowly seep out into the natural environment. A single lithium-ion
battery has the potential to contaminate up to 600,000 liters of
groundwater.
Unfortunately, it’s a subject that for many is largely ignored, and I– like many other people– don’t have any easy answers.
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