Scan Business | Regular | We Gotta Do Something
have combined the best offerings in terms of environmental performance into one product. The casing is made with a mix of two plastics and 50% of the plastic is made out of bio-based materials meaning that it is made out of renewable resources, not oil. We have calculated that this particular material that we’ve been using in this first generation of bio-based cases has reduced the CO2 impact with roughly 25% in the manufacturing phase compared to the conventional kind of plastic we use in our mobile phones. The charger that comes with the 3110 Evolve is also much more energy-efficient than ordinary chargers. With this new charger, we have been able to reduce the energy consumption down to about 50 milliwatts when the battery is full but the charger is still connected to the electrical socket or the phone has been disconnected from the charger, but the charger is still plugged in. At the moment our average chargers use around 150 milliwatts, but our target is to reduce this by 50% by 2010. This new charger is being rolled out with many of our new products. We also work hard to raise awareness around environmental issues. Nokia was for example the first manufacturer to remind our customers that they should unplug their charger when the battery is full.
Markus Terho, Director of Environmental Affairs, Markets at Nokia.
We have a billion people in the world using a Nokia phone, so if everyone unplugged their chargers when not in use we would save an amount of energy equivalent to the annual energy-use of 100,000 average-sized European households.
manufacturer to introduce a product, in 2005, which met new EU regulations on restrictions of certain substances a year before they came into force.
Would it ever be possible to make a mobile phone that doesn’t contain any dangerous substances?
Recycle your old mobile devices. We take them back in 85 countries in the world in more than 5,000 physical locations. You can go onto Nokia’s websites and find your local recycling location, bring in your old phones and we’ll recycle them responsibly.
There are some materials in a mobile phone that require special attention. The challenge is that something that is widely recognised as safe today, we may find in five or ten years’ time, according to new scientific findings, shouldn’t be in our products. Nokia collects and analyses every single piece of material that goes into our products from batteries to keypads so we can take very quick action to make sure that a particular substance no longer is in Nokia’s products should they turn out to be harmful. An example of Nokia being proactive is that we were the first
What can we do if we can’t live without our mobile phone but want to be as green as possible?
“We Gotta Do Something!” is a regular feature in Scan Magazine. It gives Scandinavian companies the opportunity to tell about initiatives they take to conduct business in an environmentally sustainable way. Are you doing something? Email rikke@scanmagazine.co.uk
Issue 5 | February 2009 | 53