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The company believes that the alerts, which will eventually be included on all its phones, could save enough electricity to power 85,000 homes a year. They will initially be popping up on the Nokia 1200, Nokia 1208, Nokia 1650, which were launched this month in India, China and Latin America.

Kirsi Sormunen, VP of Environmental Affairs at Nokia, said that around two-thirds of the energy consumed by charging a mobile phone is wasted when the charger sits alone, plugged in a live socket.

'We want to reduce this waste and are working on reducing to an absolute minimum the amount

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of energy our chargers use. The new alerts also play an important role, encouraging people to help us in this goal by unplugging their chargers.'

Last year Nokia introduced a new range of chargers that meet European Union standards and use 50-70 per cent less energy than the US Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star requirement.

Sormunen said the company hopes to further reduce the energy consumption of its chargers. By 2010 it aims to have reduced the amount of electricity a charger consumes while still plugged into the mains, but not the phone, by an extra 50 per cent.

Domia, a company that makes energy saving devices, calculates that one mobile phone charger left plugged in can generate 50kg of CO² in a year, while a Cambridge University study found that the electricity wasted globally could be worth £135 million or more each year.

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