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Written by Natalya Stanko   
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Thursday, 07 April 2011

Smartphones

Planet Earth is teeming with phones. There are about 5 billion cellular phones in use right now, and 500 million of them—10 percent—are smartphones.1 Unfortunately, these numbers are swelling. The United Nations expects the number of smartphones to quadruple to 2 billion in just four years.2 At each stage of its lifecycle, a smartphone is quite a ways off from being the slightest bit “green”.

Smartphone Raw Materials and Manufacturing: Just like your TVs, laptops, ipod, and other gadgets, smartphones are electronics, and unfortunately all electronics contain toxins. They're made of more than 1,000 materials, including chlorinated solvents, brominated flame retardants (BFRs), heavy metals, plastics—including the “poison plastic” PVC—and gases.3 According to a powerful 2009 article by The Globe and Mail, smartphones are “bloodstains on your fingertips.”4 The phones contain tantalum, which comes from the mineral Coltan, which is dug out by hand, often by children, in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the last twelve years, seven million people have died in the fight to control the country's 25 trillion dollars worth of untapped minerals, and every smartphone purchase finances those deaths.5

Smartphone Packaging: After it's manufactured, the smartphone is shipped to its consumer in an oversized package that often isn't even recyclable. The consumer anxiously tears away the packaging and sends it to the landfill.

Consumer Usage of Smartphones: Mobile phone usage contributes much more to greenhouse gas emissions than phone production. According to the Guardian:
One estimate for the emissions caused by manufacturing the phone itself is just 16kg CO2e, equivalent to nearly 1kg of beef. If you include the power it consumes over two typical years that figure rises to 22kg. But the footprint of the energy required to transmit your calls across the network is about three times all of this put together, taking us to a best estimate of 94kg CO2e over the life of the phone, or 47kg per year.6
Smartphone Disposal: According to the Environmental Protection Agency, most consumers do not know where or how to recycle their cell phones. This is a huge part of the reason why only 10% of unwanted phones are recycled.7 The rest end up in landfills as e-waste GreeniacsArticles, where their toxic components contaminate land and waters.

Smartphones—the Bright Side? Smartphones do acquire a tinge of green when you consider their remarkable functionality. Smartphones can replace many other gadgets, including basic cell phones, mp3 players, cameras, video players, netbooks, GPS devices, paper maps, paper calendars, paper notepads, and maybe even personal computers! They enable environmental activists to connect with other activists like never before. Most importantly, many smartphones (especially the iPhone) provide applications and games that make living green much easier. Here's just a sampling of the green apps out there:
  • Good Guide—iPhone and Text Messaging—Scan a product barcode to instantly get information about the safety and sustainability of over 75,000 products.8

  • Hidden Park—iphone—Get the kids outside! This game blends fantasy with reality, leading children through an adventure in their local park. Discover trolls, fairies, and tree genies with your little ones9

  • Project Noah--iphone and Android—Learn about thousands of organisms from around the world and help scientists with ongoing research by documenting nature with your phone.10

  • Lazy Green—iPhone—Raise a virtual animal threatened by extinction (sea turtle, lion, polar bear, penguin, hummingbird) by completing energy-saving tasks in real life.11
Should you get a smartphone?
That's a moral dilemma you'll have to tackle yourself. If you already have a basic cell phone, mp3 player, camera, video player, netbook, GPS device, paper map, paper calendar, paper notepad, and computer, isn't the smartphone redundant? Ask yourself: Do I really need it right now? If you do purchase a smartphone, or if you already have one, follow these tips to make it just a shade greener. Note that many of these apply to old-fashioned cell phones too!
  • Choose a green-ish device. No electronics company is truly green, but some are a bit better than others. For example, Nokia trumps Apple. Check out Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics for more information.

  • Log off. Don't be the one texting or googling underneath the table through dinner. Less phone time equates to less carbon emissions.12

  • To further reduce your energy consumption, dim your smartphone's backlighting. Switch off your wireless and Bluetooth applications when you don't need them. Unplug the charger as soon as the battery is full.

  • Avoid buying all the cheesy accessories for your phone and instead make your own accessories! If you prefer buying to DIY, check out this wooden iPhone case.

  • Recycle your dead smartphone. While you're at it, get some cash in exchange: cashforsmartphones.com. If we Americans reused all the metals, copper, and plastics in old phones to make new ones, we could save enough energy to power more than 18,500 U.S. households with electricity for one year, according to the EPA.13 Carefully dispose of the battery as well: Battery Recycling and Disposal for your Household.GreeniacsArticles

  • Use your smartphone until it dies. The average phone is used for two years, even though most phones could last for ten years!14 Don't be tempted by the latest specs and trends. If you catch yourself eying a new sleeker model, once again ask yourself: Do I really need it right now?
For more on how to green your electronics, check out: Green ElectronicsGreeniacsArticles

Browse all Greeniacs Articles Browse all Greeniacs Guides        Browse all Greeniacs Articles
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1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10569081
2 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41562147/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/
3 http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/
4 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/smartphones-blood-stains-at-our-
fingertips/article1825207/singlepage/#articlecontent

5 Id.
6 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/
jun/09/carbon-footprint-mobile-phone

7 http://www.epa.gov/osw/partnerships/plugin/cellphone/cell-fs.htm
8 http://www.goodguide.com/about/mobile
9 http://www.thehiddenpark.com/about
10 http://www.projectnoah.org/
11 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lazy-green/id401112539?mt=8
12 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jun/09/
carbon-footprint-mobile-phone

13 http://www.epa.gov/osw/partnerships/plugin/cellphone/cell-fs.htm
14 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jun/09/
carbon-footprint-mobile-phone





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Last Updated ( Thursday, 07 April 2011 )

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Green Facts

  • Glass can be recycled over and over again without ever wearing down.

  • A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.

  • Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months

  • You’ll save two pounds of carbon for every 20 glass bottles that you recycle.

  • Washing your clothes in cold or warm instead of hot water saves 500 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and drying your clothes on a clothesline six months out of the year would save another 700 pounds.

  • Turning off the tap when brushing your teeth can save as much as 10 gallons a day per person.

  • Refrigerators built in 1975 used 4 times more energy than current models.

  • Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct.

  • One recycled aluminum can will save enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours.

  • 82 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from burning fossil fuels.

  • A tree that provides a home with shade from the sun can reduce the energy required to run the air conditioner and save an additional 200 to 2,000 pounds of carbon over its lifetime.

  • Recycling for one year at Stanford University saved the equivalent of 33,913 trees and the need for 636 tons of iron ore, coal, and limestone.

  • The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million people die prematurely worldwide every year due to air pollution.

  • States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.

  • Shaving 10 miles off of your weekly driving pattern can eliminate about 500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year.

  • In the United States, automobiles produce over 20 percent of total carbon emissions. Walk or bike and you'll save one pound of carbon for every mile you travel.

  • If every U.S. household turned the thermostat down by 10 degrees for seven hours each night during the cold months, and seven hours each weekday, it would prevent nearly gas emissions.

  • Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.

  • 77% of people who commute to work by car drive alone.

  • American workers spend an average of 47 hours per year commuting through rush hour traffic. This adds up to 23 billion gallons of gas wasted in traffic each year.

  • Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch.

  • Bamboo absorbs 35% more carbon dioxide than equivalent stands of trees.

  • Recycling 100 million cell phones can save enough energy to power 18,500 homes in the U.S. for a year.

  • Current sea ice levels are at least 47% lower than they were in 1979.

  • It takes 6,000,000 trees to make 1 year's worth of tissues for the world.

  • Due to tiger poaching, habitat destruction, and other human-tiger conflicts, tigers now number around 3,200—a decrease in population by about 70% from 100 years ago.

  • Americans throw away more than 120 million cell phones each year, which contribute 60,000 tons of waste to landfills annually.

  • Nudge your thermostat up two degrees in the summer and down two degrees in the winter to prevent 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

  • A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution, and mining wastes by about 70%.

  • A laptop consumes five times less electricity than a desktop computer.

  • Recycling 1 million laptop computers can save the amount of energy used by 3,657 homes in the U.S. over the course of a year.

  • Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.

  • An aluminum can that is thrown away instead of recycled will still be a can 500 years from now!

  • In California homes, about 10% of energy usage is related to TVs, DVRs, cable and satellite boxes, and DVD players.

  • You will save 100 pounds of carbon for each incandescent bulb that you replace with a compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), over the life of the bulb.

  • Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.

  • You will save 300 pounds of carbon dioxide for every 10,000 miles you drive if you always keep your car’s tires fully inflated.

  • For every 38,000 bills consumers pay online instead of by mail, 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are avoided and two tons of trees are preserved.

  • Less than 1% of electricity in the United States is generated from solar power.