Sony Ericsson launches "Greenheart" initiative

4 June 2009 9:12 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Sony Ericsson has announced a new environmental initiative called "Greenheart". It applies across the whole range of the company's phones, though there will also be some special handsets that are extra-green.

When announcing the move, the company quoted John Grant's "The Green Marketing Manifesto" in saying that "It's not about making normal phones green, it's about making green phones normal". To that end, the company is undertaking several tasks.

Firstly, it's dumping paper manuals for its handsets. Instead, the manuals will come on the phone itself, which plugs into a PC. In the box will only remain a quickstart guide and information that has to be included by law.

Additionally, the company is shifting to smaller packaging, made of recycled materials. Between that and the removal of the boxed manual, the company will be using 92% less paper and reduce the CO2 in the phone's lifecycle by 3kg - 15%.

The three handsets recently launched will include these improvements, so don't expect a manual if you're buying the Yari, Aino or Satio.

Sony Ericsson is also launching two new handsets. The first will be a "Greenheart" edition of the C901. This will arrive at the end of the month and have all the features of the C901, including 5-megapixel camera.

However it will be different in other ways - the casing is made of recycled plastic, from old CDs, CD cases and water bottles. A water-based paint is used to colour it, and the charger it comes with is labelled as "eco-friendly".

There's also "Walkmate Eco" software pre-loaded, that measures your footsteps when activated and tells you how much CO2 you've saved by not driving the equivalent distance.

Then, later in the year, at the start of Q4, will be another handset called the Naite. This will be built from the ground up to be environmentally friendly, including the improvements above as well as more software applications, allowing you to publish your carbon savings to social networks.

Sony Ericsson criticised other phones that come with built-in solar panels, as being wasteful. Apparently the chipset is one of the biggest contributors to the carbon footprint of a handset.

Adding more silicon on in the form of a solar panel doesn't offset anywhere near enough carbon for it to be worthwhile. In fact, the company says that charging a phone daily for 3 years only contributes 10% of the carbon footprint of the lifetime of the device.

The company plans further "Greenheart" phones with recycled components, including a business-oriented smartphone in the early part of next year. However, it said that smartphones are inherently more wasteful, due to their screen size.

Glass-making is another big contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, so generally the bigger the screen, the more CO2 involved in making it. As a result, the average smartphone involves 30-35kg of carbon emissions.

Sony Ericsson's entry-level green handsets, on the other hand, only push out 17-18kg of CO2 - half that of the average smartphone. Don't plump for an iPhone, though - they take up 55kg of carbon dioxide in their lifetime.

Finally, the company has pledged to reduce its carbon footprint by 20% on 2008 levels by 2015, reduce the lifecycle impact of its phones by 15% by 2015, and collect 1 million phones per year for recycling by 2011.

Noble, and lofty goals, I'm sure you'll agree. However, we put it to the company that this was just "greening" ordinary phones, not making green phones ordinary as pledged at the start. Especially as the plans to roll out recycled plastic are limited to (currently) just two handsets.

The company responded that it would like to do more with recycled plastic, but it's difficult to get it in good quality in sufficient quantity to make all phones with recycled plastic. Apparently it's looking in to vegetable-based plastics, using corn starch, but that research is still at an early phase.

We'll keep you updated with Sony Ericsson's future Greenheart plans, as well as any other mobile phone news. Stay tuned.