How A Green Mobile Phone Makes You Eco Friendly

Mobile phones are wonderful, they hold all your friends telephone numbers and details; you can order up a Pizza, use them as a map finder and browse the world around us.  They have become an essential must have tool in the modern world.  But there are some critical differences one must consider between a green mobile phone and a ‘normal’ phone.

Woman using mobile phone in nature

Sad to say there is an environmental impact of owning a mobile phone, one that starts from the cradle to the grave. Mobile phones are just like other manufactured products they contain up to a 1000 components, so they can use a fair amount of resources.

Some 1.2 Billion mobiles were sold in 2009, a 5% increase on the year before.  If you were to talk on mobile for an hour a day, for a year; that can produce up to a tonne of CO2, which is about the equivalent of a trip by jet from London to New York!  And with the rise of the smartphone, it doesn’t look like our need for the handheld wonder is abating.

So what are the benefits of a green mobile phone over their non green cousins?

•    Greener mobiles generally use recycled materials, their whole styling, design and production looks to reduce their resource impact on virgin minerals.

•    Plastics can be reused up to 6 times, which is a good thing because there is a mountain of plastic sitting in landfill sites, some of the new order of eco phones use between 50% and 80% recycled plastics in their production.

•    Environmentally friendly mobiles typically don’t use poisonous chemicals such lead, cadmium, mercury, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), brominates flame retardants.

•    New software design means that greener mobiles are now designed with ways of improving their energy saving abilities. That means they don’t need to be charged as much, so chargers are not left on for so long thus wasting energy.

•    Packaging has always been a problem with mobiles; often the box a mobile is supplied with, is unnecessarily large designed as part of the mobiles ego. Manufacturers are looking at their grandiose use of packaging materials are making serious inroads into reducing packaging and using recycled packaging material.

Owning a green mobile is just like owning a ‘normal mobile’. Green mobiles have a smaller carbon footprint; it means that your phone during its production and design has been environmentally thought through. It means you care just a little bit more.

Ultimately you should choose a mobile phone because it does all that you want it to, has all the applications you want, provides you with the kind of services, or network quality, style that you want. The good news is that green mobile phones have all the things that a ‘normal’ mobile has, but they have one added function – their impact on the Earth is so much more in balance with the world.