Greenpeace tells mobile phone makers: be greener

 

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By Tim Danton in Las Vegas

Posted on 9 Jan 2009 at 22:24

CES 2009: Following the release of its latest report on Green Electronics, Greenpeace today called on gadget makers to increase their efforts still further - with mobile phone makers bearing the brunt of its criticisms.

"It's very clear that mobile phones are not being designed for best lifecycle policy. The upgradability of these phones is almost nil," said Casey Harrell, the report's author.

On top of this, Greenpeace is highly critical of the limited lifecycle of phones, with an average 18-month life. It places a lot of the blame on marketing, with consumers bombarded with advertising based on new features in an effort to make them upgrade.

There's still lots of room for improvement elsewhere in the industry too. " Nobody should be resting on their laurels," said Harrell. "We should see companies driving more global take-back and recycling the plastic in their products."

Greenpeace also called for an international standard for measuring the energy consumed by products, and criticised all those companies that created "green" products but not as their mainstream lines.

"We don't want green products, we want green products to be the products," said Harrell. "So if these products are not modelled and marketed to be one of their leading products then that's ultimately going to be a problem."

Nevertheless, Harrell praised the industry for its improvement over last year. "Progress is being made and that's a very important thing to emphasise," he said. "We're no longer having to cajole companies for the need to be green.

"Energy Star is being exceeded with surprising speed, with new products coming out that are already beating the Energy Star 5 standard that's coming out this year."

Lenovo was the star of the year's survey, with its ThinkCenter 58 winning the desktop computer category and the L2440x taking top spot for computer monitors.

Read the full report on the Greenpeace website.