LG Optimus Elite (Source: LGE)
In honor of Earth Day, Sprint announced that it will be launching LG’s greenest smartphones for 2012 on April 22nd: the LG Viper™ 4G LTE, the first Sprint 4G LTE with eco-friendly features and LG Optimus Elite™. While both smartphones represent advances in the sustainability of smartphones, LG has room to grow greener with other eco-friendly features that would be easy to implement.
Nearly one year ago, I wrote about the “Top 10 Features that Green Smartphones Must Have” that provides a useful benchmark for how the latest LG smartphones succeed and a roadmap for additional features that would benefit consumers and yield a greener planet. LG leads the industry by providing seven of the Top 10 Features in its newest smartphones with:
- Carbon-free certification that offsets the carbon footprint of the phone’s full life-cycle;
- Zero use of hazardous chemicals: the RoHS compliance ensures that there are no hazardous materials such as PVC, phthalates, halogens and mercury;
- ULE Platinum Certification which is the highest level of environmental performance recognized in the sustainability requirements published by the Underwriters’ Laboratories;
- A Near zero energy charger that exceeds the EC Code of Conduct on energy efficiency with no-load consumption: it only consumes 0.03 watts of power when plugged into a wall socket without being connected to a phone;
- 100% recycled and recyclable packaging printed with soy inks and engineered with glueless construction;
- Green Applications: Sprint’s GreenID pack is the only eco-friendly bundle of applications available from any US carrier and provides a wide range of apps, widgets and mobile content to help you live more sustainably; and
- A Trade-in Recycling Program: Sprint’s Buyback Program allows you to reduce waste and recycle devices by earning credit for your old phone (independent of which carrier it is from).
Three additional green features that LG and other smartphone suppliers need to provide to improve sustainability include:
- 100% recyclable housing made from 100% recycled material: Motorola created the world’s first mobile phone (Renew) made using plastics comprised of recycled water bottles in 2009. The LG Optimus Elite is comprised of 50% recycled plastics;
- Eco-Friendly accessories: Any accessories provided (charger, ear buds, etc.) need to be made with 100% recycled and recyclable materials; and
- A Smart-home ecosystem option: At CES 2012, Google’s Eric Schmidt shared plans about a connected home where every device and appliance would be connected via an Android-based platform like Android@home (fast forward to the 43rd minute on the YouTube video overview for a demo).
What other green features would you like to see in the future of sustainable smartphones?
If you enjoyed reading this, you may also like to read:
- Trash Tech: Should Americans Be “Taxed” for Food Waste?
- Time for Green Consumer to DWYSYWD
- Eco Marathon: Can You Get 3000 MPG?
- Do Smartphones Have an Afterlife?
- Why Samsung Can Win Win with Green (Eco) Products
© 2012 by Ed Valdez. All rights reserved.
Trademarks and Logos are properties of their respective companies.
* Article first published on Technorati as “Why LG’s Greenest Smartphone Should Be Greener.”
chemosabe
April 24, 2012
Right, what could be worse for us and the planet than the vital, life-giving gas carbon dioxide getting into the atmosphere? OK, it might add a nearly negligible warming effect on top of the absolutely massive warming effect of another gas called dihydrogen monoxide, which also happens to cover 70% of this planet in liquid form several miles deep. But hey, plants and plankton thrive on CO2, and we eat those. Also, warming is better than cooling, and it so happens that we are due now for a looong ice age. Don’t look now but interglacial periods like the one we live in now last around 12K years on the outside, and the one we are in now is about 12K years old.