'There is no such thing as a green product' says one expert. But are mobile phones leading a technology revolution?
Nigel Kendall The Times 1 Apr 10;
Attempts by corporate giants to prove their green credentials are often met with suspicion — usually with good reason. At a recent UK press event, representatives of the Japanese electronics giant Toshiba spent 30 minutes regaling journalists with new technologies — from batteries to products with better power consumption, new lightbulbs and toxin-free laptops — in a bid to emphasise their eco-friendliness.
As a gift, those attending were presented with a 2.5 inch external hard drive. It came encased in a heavy-duty plastic box three times the size of the device, and complete with a 120-page instruction booklet in 11 languages. The instructions could be boiled down to six words: “Plug it in to a computer.”
This is a fairly typical tale, and Toshiba is by no means alone in declaring its conversion to more ecologically friendly processes one minute, while acting utterly thoughtlessly the next.
The story also illustrates an essential truth about green issues and technology. They are mutually incompatible. If you want a green life, drop everything and go live in a cave. Those of us unwilling to do so are in a permanent position of compromise, all we can hope to do is minimise the environmental damage we are causing.
“There is no such thing as a green product,” says the head of sustainability at Sony Ericsson, Mats Pellbäck Scharp. “What we are doing is taking every small step towards a better product by reducing the total amount of impact that a product has.”
Over the past ten years, Pellbäck Scharp pointed out, Sony Ericsson, like many other companies in its field, has worked to eliminate toxic chemicals from its manufacturing processes, including PVC, brominated flame retardants and cadmium (from batteries).
Like most technologies when they first appear, mobile phones have long been the subject of concern, ranging from now discredited theories about brain-heating and transmitter masts causing cancer, to panic about their environmental impact, especially arsenic and mercury, which are used in LCD screens.
“An average mobile phone contributes 8kg of CO2 per year to a user’s carbon footprint,” Pellbäck Scharp says. “But the average carbon footprint is eight tonnes per year, so we are talking about 0.008 per cent.”
The figure broadly tallies with an estimate from his rival Apple, which puts the environmental impact of an iPhone over a three-year lifecycle at 55kg of CO2, including manufacture and use.
“More than ten years ago,” Pellbäck Scharp adds, “we started looking at the charging on the energy side and the chemicals on the manufacturing side and the toxic impact and working conditions in the supply chain on the social side.”
Given all these improvements, you might expect the environmental pressure group Greenpeace to be delighted. It’s not.
“These companies are still encouraging people to ditch phones after one or two years of use. We would like to see phone companies use more modular design, so that you could upgrade a mobile phone with more memory without buying a new one,” Iza Kruszewska, Greenpeace’s international toxics campaigner, says. “It becomes more difficult, of course, when a phone is sold as a lifestyle accessory, by its look, rather than by its new technical features.”
