Dead Ringers
Last year I happened to be at the London Science Museum when the Dead Ringers exhibition was running. It was an exhibition revealing how wasteful the mobile phone is and what scientists and industry are doing to combat the waste.
Most of the facts and figures are UK-centric but I suspect they are just as applicable to other countries…
People replace their phones mainly because…
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they aren’t up to date technically
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they aren’t the latest style
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network operators make it appear cheaper and easier to change tariff and phone at the same time
People keep their phone on average for only 18 months. They either tend to keep old mobiles or throw them away. I find it intriguing that so many people, including myself, keep phones that are never used again. I suspect it’s something to do with the memories people have associated with the time when they used the phone.
People often think it’s more environmentally responsible to pass them on to others, particularly to those in developing countries. However, environmental groups are worried that we’re setting up a one-way waste chute to dump our digital goods.
NEC have a phone, only available in Japan, that’s biodegradable. Nokia also have different types of bio-plastic under development. Liquid crystal displays are complex and the crystals themselves take a lot of energy to produce. Weight for weight, the crystals are more expensive than gold or platinum.
There’s a web site for the exhibition for more information on what’s being done to combat mobile phone waste.
This post was written for blog action day. Bloggers around the web are uniting to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment.