The environmental assessment aims to make the sustainability of smartphones recognizable – The cell phone SAR values can now be queried, the camera quality is listed in the ranking, and in the future one should also be able to read the smartphone’s sustainability in a new rating. The new index should start online from June 12th, then make sustainability readable for a whole host of cell phones and smartphones.
The companies write:
The Environmental Assessment Initiative was launched jointly with Deutsche Telekom, Orange and Telefónica (under the brands O2 Movistar), Telia, and Vodafone. The aim is to provide end customers with standardized and accurate information about the environmental impacts in relation to the manufacture, use, transport and disposal of smartphones and feature phones. Environmental rating enables operators and their customers to better rate the sustainability of mobile devices. Additionally, the rating reflects consumer demand for more sustainable electrical appliances.
After an in-depth evaluation, each mobile phone receives an overall rating of a maximum of 100 points, which demonstrates the environmental compatibility of the device throughout its entire life cycle. In addition, the environmental rating score will highlight five key aspects of the sustainability of mobile communication devices, thus providing information on longevity, repairability, recyclability, climate compatibility and resource conservation for individual devices. The following is evaluated in detail:
- Durability: includes durability, battery life, and warranty period for the device and its components.
- Repairability: includes, for example, the design of the mobile phone and additional measures that improve the repairability, reuse and upgrade of the device and thus extend its useful life. The higher the score in the repairable category, the better the machine’s scores in these aspects.
- Recyclability: It records how easy it is to disassemble the device into its components and recover the recyclables used in it, what information is provided and how easy it is to recycle the recyclable materials.
- Climate Compatibility: It assesses a device’s greenhouse gas emissions over its entire life cycle. The higher the score, the lower the impact on the climate.
- Conservation of resources: Evaluates the effects of the amount of scarce raw materials (such as gold for manufacturing electronic components) embedded in the device on resource depletion. The higher the score in this category, the less impact the machine has on the availability of rare raw materials.
Brands in the ranking at the beginning:
- Bullitt Group – the home of the CAT
- Motorola rugged phones,
- Douro,
- HMD Global – the home of Nokia phones,
- Huawei,
- MobiWire,
- Motorola / Lenovo,
- OnePlus,
- Oppo,
- Samsung Electronics,
- TCL / Alcatel,
- Xiaomi
- ZTE
Apple doesn’t seem to exist yet.
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