Environmentally friendly mobile phones, also known as green mobile phones, are great for our planet. Here in Brighton, more and more people are rejecting the wasteful wasys of the past and investing in a green future. Reject the a world full of coal, rising sealevels and huge swings in temperature in favour of the eco life.
We believe in the concept of green. Green energy, green lives, green mobile phones.
If you don’t have an environmentally friendly mobile telephone, what are you thinking? Don’t you care about securing the future of our planet?
Current Most Environmentally Friendly Mobile Phones
These are currently the three best environmentally friendly mobile phones available today.
- Fairphone 4
- iPhone 13 Pro
- Realme GT 2 Pro
The price ranges vary for these phones, but you can find something to suit your budget and they look great too.
What Is An Environmentally Friendly Mobile Phone?
An environmentally friendly mobile phone is one that has as little impact on the environment as it can during construction, then operates in a way that reduces its carbon footprint in comparison to other mobile phones.
So let’s add the Nokia 402 to our list of environmentally friendly mobile phones. Why? Because any phone that can last more than a week without being charged is 100% an environmentally friendly option.
Parts Sourcing
Mining things like cobat and other rare earth minerals to produce parts like batteries and circuitry really harm the environment. An environmentally friendly mobile phone, therefore, is one that mines the products that create it responsibly. The people working to extricate the raw materials should also be treated with due respect.
Extracting elements from the earth can take a lot away from a mobile phone’s environmentally friendly credentials. Cobalt mining is one process that takes a toll on both the environment and the people who extract it. Manufacturers like Fairphone make sure they source materials from organisations that treat workers and the environment with the respect they deserve. Most other mobile phone manufacturers don’t and can’t actually verify the origin of their products which often pass through many hands before ending up at one of their manufacturing facilities.
Design
Environmentally friendly mobile phones may also be modular in design, so individual parts can be repaired or replaced more easily. There will be no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater and replace a whole phone if there’s an issue.
Lifetime
During its lifetime, your environmentally friendly mobile will (hopefully) be charged with 100% renewable energy. If you’re not sure about your supplier, pick from one of the best British green energy suppliers to make sure. Once manufactured, it will be easier to recycle the finished mobile phone because the manufacturer will generally make parts easier to take apart, recycle them and make new phones.
Your mobile could also operate with energy efficient modes, so its full processing power isn’t used all the time. The screen might be smaller because we do know huge screen drain battery power that needs to be replaced. Default settings will also be geared towards saving power by having lower screen brightness or dark modes.
There are a lot of ways mobile phones can be environmentally friendly and you can see the may creative ways in our list of environmentally friendly concept phones.
History of Environmentally Friendly Mobile Phones
Really, the first mobile phones were basically radios used by armies to communicate long distances. They proved their worth as communications devices and very soon, the first bricks started appearing in consumer cars. Could they be described as environmentally friendly? Not in the slightest. Over time, mobile telephones got smaller and there were still a lot of bricks around in the 90s, though by that time, they’d graduated from only being in cars to briefcases, then hand-held.
We guess around this time is when they became widely known as ‘cell phones’ in one part of the globe. The 90s is when we saw Nokia become an absolute giant, knocking out legendary phones like the Nokia 402. Now this humble Nokia 402 could last for weeks on a single charge, so despite battery mining efforts then being equally as bad as now, at least energy use was realistic in phones that could survive anything.
During the 2000s, the internet started appearing on mobile phones. The advent of the smartphone then saw larger screens and battery life plummeted. So all those phones from the start of the smartphone era were definitely not environmentally friendly.
In most recent times, moves have been made back towards longer battery life and phones that just work. We now have modular phones that allow parts to be fixed or replaced.
We’ve gone from:
- Bricks in cars
- Cells (Nokia and before)
- First smartphones
- Environmentally friendly mobile phones
Mobile Phone Environmental Concerns
Raw Materials
Those raw materials from the earth that are refined into the finished product are the biggest concern around the mobile telephone.
Cobalt is one of the most important materials in the cnstruction of phones and the way it is removed from our planet.the process is mostly completed by hand, in tough conditions using pick axes, shovels and even sending human beings into narrow tunels deep under ground. It’s simply a dirty process with no regard for the state the earth is left in, nor for the people actually getting their hands dirty.
Forests are hacked down and the earth gouged seemingly at random to get at the cobalt. We need this stuff for our lithium ion rechargable batteries and right now, there’s no alternative. It’s true cobalt can be recovered more responsibly, though still really damaging to the environment with huge diggers, but there’s no way to tell how environmnetally friendly the extraction proces was because ti all just gets mixed in together. Fixing the actual supply chain is the task we need to start adressing.
Aside from the environmental impact, we want you to remember this: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC aka Congo DRC), produced 27% of the world’s cobalt in 2021, used to produce some of the world’s most expensive goods and was still the 9th poorest in the world with a per-capita GDP of US$552.
Recycling
Recycling the raw materials of all electroncs, not just mobile phones is a reall issue in our world today. A lot of burning wires and circuit boards happens to release recyclable metals from plastics.
That is a fact we need to remember when it comes to recycling electronics like mobile phones. To actually recover the valuable metals from a printed circuit board (PCB), you need to heat it to around 400C. That is in laboratory conditions, but out in the real world which are the dumping grounds of third world countries, the recovery process means just burning the boards. To actually recycle the metals, we are contributing CO2 and many other harmful chemicals into the atmosphere.
Lead, cadmium, beryllium, cobalt, lithium, and many other kinds of chemicals are released into the atmosphere, soil and the lungs of people doing the recycling. Shredding the pcb into tiny pieces allows magnets to attract metallic parts which are magnetic, then we can use smaller scale magnetic effects to attract less strong metals, leaving plastics and not magnetic pieces of the pcb. From there, we get into using chemical processes to separate and suitably dispose of the last plastics and metals. Tin, lead and copper are the focus because they are still present in reasonably large amounts once the sequential recovery of metals from waste printed circuit boards using a zero-discharge hydrometallurgical process has begun.
Basically, recycling the pcb boards requires the collection and processing of a lot of them together using a highly structured scientific process. As it stands, this process takes place in developing countries. An environmentally friendly mobile phone will therefore have facilities provided by its manufacturer to recycle not only its own mobile phones, but also from other manufacturers.
Get Your Environmentally Friendly Phone
So there you have it, the list of environmentally friendly mobile phones, a definition, history and recycling methods for the phones. We hope you’ll go for a more environmentally friendly option when you choose you next mobile phone.
Buy environmentally friendly phones directly from Greenermobiles.com or industry leaders.
Environmentally Friendly Phone Contracts
Already have an environmentally friendly phone? Grab an environmentally friendly mobile phone contract from us or another industry leader, save money and save the planet.
Environmentally Friendly Green Concept Phone
You may also want to consider the Greenermobiles.com C1 green concept phone which is another alternative to large scale manufactured phones that don’t take the environment into account.