Nokia, bioplastics and the big green responsibility debate
Some of you may or may not know that on my personal blog, I cover green and social change issues. This week I’ve been talking about manufacturer’s attempts to make their phones ‘greener’, looking specifically at Nokia, bioplastics and extended producer responsibility.
we:recycle, but is that enough?
I thought some of you might find it interesting as well, so have re-published below.
At present, the European Commission is considering applying stronger regulatory actions to try and address the 10.3 billion tonnes of electronic waste produced each year in Europe.
Right now, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) guidelines have been implemented in many forms, which means that a manufacturer takes accountability for a product beyond the time of sale.
This ranges from regulatory to negotiated and even voluntary models, depending on individual EU member countries.
In many instances, EPR has already influenced the waste legislation or is being positioned to do so.
Once upon a time, Nokia was one of the worst culprits for having a poor attitude toward being sustainable, but has recently (well, over the past ten years) come along in leaps and bounds. Many of its ERP initiatives seem to have been put in place way before it was forced to (Germany and Spain are the two examples they reference). Its ‘Take-Back’ programme collects phones at nearly 5,000 locations globally and the company as a whole has employed a commitment toreduce absolute CO2 emissions by a minimum of 10% by the end of 2009 and 18% by 2010.
Part of the commitment to becoming ‘greener’ means not focusing purely on how to recycle a device once it’s become obsolete, but looking at the materials and components of the handset as well. Nokia first introduced products that were free of PVC — a harmful plastic often used to insulate wires in phones — at the beginning of 2006. Then, the Nokia 7100 Supernova followed suit last year and became the first product free of brominated compounds, antimony trioxide and chlorinated flame retardants.
Nokia isn’t alone; LG has also stopped using beryllium, known to cause nasty lung diseases. In fact, all of the top tier manufacturers are RoHS-complaint, which means that their phones contain no more than the agreed-upon levels of lead, cadmium, mercury and other harmful materials. It’s actually safe to assume that no new handset is going to be produced with hazardous chemicals in.
Both Nokia and LG, as well as several other manufacturers, are working on biodegradable plastics and renewable sources, but haven’t rolled them out on mass yet. The Nokia 3100 Evolve for one has a bio-cover made from 50 percent renewable raw materials, but this is not without its problems.
As well as getting hold of enough of these resources in the first place, one problem is that a bioplastics should ideally be composted and cannot be recycled alongside other plastics (different types of resin you see). When mixed, bioplastics are in fact more harmful than they are useful, and without an advanced infrastructure in place to separate them, the correct identification and sorting becomes a difficult task.
Now, Nokia supports individual producer responsibility, so they – like others – spend an extraordinary amount in overcoming these hurdles. The company has invested in creating a device that could be made entirely from recycled materials, the aim of which is to avoid virgin materials and to divert waste from going into landfills. The main outcome of this project had been the ‘Remade’ concept device, which uses recycled materials from metal cans, plastic bottles, and car tires.
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