Green Phones: Just Another Marketing Ploy?

Ever wondered what happens to your discarded old cell phones? Far from your expectations, unused cell phones finally end up in some land fills most probably in some poor countries which import cheap second hand electronics. This electronic waste is toxic and hazardous to our environment.

The latest offerings from top cell phone companies are the so called ‘Green’ phones. These phones are mostly made of recycled plastic bottles and use solar cells for charging. Some of them offer applications on their phones that let users calculate their automobile carbon emissions and also their carbon footprint based on their other daily activities.

Samsung has come up with the Blue Earth handset which is a stylish device that is made of recycled plastic and uses solar power as alternative source. Apart from these two eco-friendly features, it has single click access to ‘Eco Mode’ which makes the phone go into minimum energy mode.

Last year, Nokia came up with a conceptual green phone called Remade which has an outer casing made of completely recyclable materials. Nokia has not yet turned this concept into design.

Nokia Remade

Motorala’s W233 Renew, LG’s solar powered prototype phone unveiled at the Mobile world Congress 2009 are all indicative of mobile companies’ efforts to give environment-conscious consumers eco-friendly appliances.

While most of the companies have started concentrating their green initiative in specialised handsets which are priced at high end levels, Sony Ericsson’s concept phone ‘GreenHeart’ will be used as a study to implement the eco-friendly features across all their mobiles in the future. They have opted out of the solar power feature as they rightly found that manufacturing a solar cell would take up more energy than that saved by charging a mobile device through it!

This brings up the question as to how effective the features offered by various companies are in creating an eco-friendly mobile consumerism. Features like applications which calculate carbon footprints or carbon emissions are no more effective in changing the user’s habit’s than the calorie counters in weight management programs!

While solar cells sound a bit close to saving energy, their effectiveness is very little given that it would take 10 to 14 hours of direct sunlight to completely charge these mobile phones. Given our hectic schedules and also the current state of economy, we cannot afford to bask in the sun for such a long time!

While all manufacturers are doing their part in avoiding hazardous materials like lead, cadmium , mercury etc in their eco-friendly products, also using plastics made from recyclable material, this alone is not enough to sell their heavily priced products in a niche market under the label ‘green’. More research needs to be done to make this mandatory to all of their products and price them within the reach of majority of consumers.The initiative towards ‘greener’ appliances is good, but consumers who are tech-savvy need to understand their effectiveness before they purchase these products.

Apart from stylishly designed ‘green’ phones with clever marketing strategies, real potential for truly ‘green’ phones with competitive price does exist currently. The bamboo phone which was showcased at the Greener Gadgets Competition 2008 is completely degradable and when buried in ground would sprout a tree from the bamboo seeds implanted in it. It even has a mechanical crank to store some power in it’s gear shaft for a few voice calls and text messages. However these truly ‘green’ phones are very limited in their features and functionality and less attractive to consumers.

Many more greener gadgets will be flooding the markets in future. Most of them would cater to the ever-thirsty consumers looking for never-before-seen features and designs to replace their older cell phones. Those consumers with a serious inclination towards sustaining the environment need to do a bit of research in really understanding the features before purchasing these high price devices.

It’s a true challenge for the cell phone manufactures to make a true “Green Phone” considering aesthetics, feature richness and also making it available at competitive prices. Let’s wish “Go Green; Truly”.