By Sustainability team
26th July 2010.
13:56
Monthly Archives: July 2010
It’s finally here!
Sony Ericsson’s Sustainability report for 2009.
Click on the image below to check it out!
I read an interesting article at Good about the difficulty of labeling also trying to educate on how to interpret labels. If it is difficult to understand a label on a “simple” product like skin lotion then how difficult would it not be to have it on a mobile phone?
We get the question why can you not have a label on the mobile phone for carbon footprint, or substances or why not Fairtrade. The complexity of electronic products and their supply chain makes it virtually impossible to have 100% control of the situation and status of all suppliers and their sub suppliers. To compare products based on a label without the possibility to provide full guarantees neither from the manufacturer nor from the one issuing the label creates great risks. The difficulty to get comparable data has been described on this blog before.
If we can get credible comparable data then we have the second question. What is most important energy or unwanted substances or is it the working conditions in the factory?
There are attempts to create labels for mobile phones and I hope the challenges will be possible to overcome. It is not easy to be a consumer but if we create more labels will it become easier or more difficult…..
“Interest in green products is growing, as revealed by many consumer studies in the past two years, and there are several instances of manufacturers of green products receiving favorable treatment from governments.” according to a post on The Green Channel by Annette Zimmermann referring to Gartner research. As usual when Annette writes it is balanced and well informed.
The text also includes slap on the fingers “the effect of solar panels in high-end feature or smartphones is highly debatable and these devices should not, therefore, be marketed as environmentally-friendly products.”
But the highlight comes at the end “…the mobile phone can be an important “can’t live without it” tool to enhance and push environmental education. It has the potential to become the energy metering and management device for consumers. Gartner believes the value to the consumer of the mobile device as a personal sustainability monitoring tool is as high as the value of the advanced meter reader is to the smart grid.”
I couldn’t agree more on the opportunities of mobile devices.
Just back from a stakeholder day in Bonn where Deutsche Telekom invited different people from the industry and organizations. They have a very ambitious agenda and plans going forward. Even so, most of it is of relatively little news for us that are in the sustainability area.
However, one of the things that struck me as different was that they started an agency that manage various types of posters and billboards in cities. The idea is to utilize their knowledge in telecom to innovate management and drive efficiency. They just won the contract in one major metropolitan area in Germany.
Interesting and innovative way to utilize the mobile and internet communication technology in a vertical integration driving savings on paper, transport and energy (i.e. cost). I will try to find out more about how this develops.