Mobile phone group sets green agenda

Nokia gathers device makers, operators and pressure groups

Andrew Charlesworth, vnunet.com 21 Sep 2006

Nokia is leading a group of mobile phone makers committed to improving the environmental performance of phones and raising consumer awareness of handset recycling.

The consortium covers network operators, suppliers and recyclers, as well as consumer and environmental organisations.

The group includes Motorola, Panasonic, France Telecom/Orange, Vodafone, TeliaSonera, Intel, Epson, Spansion and Umicore, and environmental experts from the WWF, the Finnish Environmental Institute, the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the European Consumers' Organisation.
Created as part of a European Commission pilot looking at how different industries could reduce the envi ronmental impact of products over their lifecycle, the group is expected to pre-empt and inform future environmental regulation from the EC.

The group has agreed on a series of new initiatives including reducing energy consumption, eliminating the use of specific materials, raising the number of phones collected through take-back schemes and recycling, and giving consumers more environmental information about products.

"Managing environmental performance is an important responsibility for the entire mobile sector," said Veli Sundbäck, executive vice president of corporate relations and responsibility at Nokia.

"By working with environmental groups we have been able to make improvements at each stage of a mobile phone's lifecycle, from when it is made right through to how it can be recycled."

To reduce the energy consumption of mobile phones the manufacturers have agreed to equip handsets with reminders to unplug chargers once the battery is recharged. Nokia plans to have these alerts in new phones by the middle of next year.

Nokia estimates that if 10 per cent of the world's mobile phone users turned off the electricity supply to their chargers after use this would save enough energy in one year to power 60,000 European homes annually.

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