The 75kg Mobile Phone

What does your mobile phone say about you? Is it the stylish, hot, latest touch-screen PDA model or do you cringe with embarrassment when forced to answer in public your three year old brick that’s held together with parcel tape and still plays that factory ringtone because you never figured out how to change it? Or do you not cringe with embarrassment? Do you wear your parcel tape and tinkly ring tone with pride, a sign that you are apart from the herd; that you know that all phones are, at bottom, just phones.

Mobile phones are slimmer and lighter than ever before, and yet every mobile phone weighs a whopping 75kg. That’s 165lbs in Roman numerals. How can we possibly carry this sort of burden around with us every day?

Every product we buy has what is known in the naturally lit corridors of eco-world as an "ecological rucksack", the amount of waste generated in producing one unit of a product. According to the guide The Management of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) the manufacture of a computer uses up nearly 1,500 kg of resources, a laptop 400 kg, and a mobile phone 75 kg. Add together all the mobile phones you've ever owned for an even more impressive figure!

That chic new upgrade has just used up 75kg of resources; some of them rare, some hazardous, and many extracted in countries where labour conditions are suspect and environmental degradation unpoliced. Did we really need that new phone, or did we just want it... really, really badly? Maybe the upgrade was just part of the contract and our provider was almost threatening to take us to court if we didn’t upgrade (know the feeling)? This is why, up against global marketing and the need of business to keep selling us stuff, knitting our own shopping bags doesn’t even begin to cut it when it comes to making a difference to our environment. One decision to NOT upgrade our mobile phone and we have, at a stroke, performed the equivalent of a year’s domestic recycling, a lifetime’s reusable bag carrying or probably a thousand years’ worth of “not printing out this blog”.

This is the nub of the Envirobitch argument. The global capitalist system works by selling us stuff. In order to sustain itself it must sell us more the following year, and the year after that. The mobile phone market is an obvious example of how we are sold and sold again more or less the same product. There have been useful developments such as SMS, but many other extras are more about creating the want than fulfilling any real need. I know… I’m back to wants and needs again, but if we’re really serious about tackling climate change, helping the environment or whatever we want to call it, we could do worse than look at our purchasing decisions. Not the “shall I stump up the extra for the conscience-salving so-called-green version” buying decision, but the “do I really need that” non-buying decision. To buy nothing is also a choice.

Sure, we can recycle our “old” mobile phone, and that’ll go a small way to offsetting the impact of our decision, but it won’t stop the demand that encourages the manufacture of more phones. And hey, if we hadn't ordered the new phone in the first place, there'd be no impact to offset. Come to that we can recycle the box it comes in too… but we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought that compensates in any way for our decision to buy.

So, before we “upgrade” our perfectly functional phone (to one with more stuff we’ll use approximately once, and a shorter battery life) we should consider just why we reckon we need it. Remember, even if your phone is old, even if it's not one of a range of fashion colours, even if the ring tone is something by 50 Cent that your teenage son installed and you've no idea how to remove it, we still love you, okay?

A few folks need the functionality of a Blackberry in order to do their jobs (although how their job has been shaped by this technology in the first place is worthy of another post at some point), but most of us don't, even if we're pretending to ourselves that we do so that we can feel like a captain of industry with all that control at our fingertips. If you want a new phone because you have a lurking desire to place it conspicuously on the table in the pub next to your BMW key ring; if you think the polyphonic ringtone’s a conversation starter; or that folks on the tram will be envious or impressed, you need to ask yourself some serious questions, and they’re not environmental ones.

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If you suffer from insomnia, or you're an enviro-nerd have a browse through The Management of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) for more information.