Greenpeace released its annual Green Gadget Guide a couple months ago. The group found that most electronics companies are making advances in areas like chemicals management and the energy efficiency of new models. But across the board, just about every company did poorly in one area: recycled content.
Only Samsung got top marks for using recycled content. This didn't make any sense to me, so I gave Greenpeace a call. That's how I got a hold of Daniel Kessler, one of the group's spokesmen.
He told me that to get top marks, at least 15 percent of the plastic a company uses needs to come from a recycled source with a timeline for increasing that amount to 25 percent. The number includes pre-consumer and post-consumer plastic. The former is plastic that the factory recycles; the latter is plastic comes from consumers, such as bottles that go into a recycling bin.
Kessler says companies are reluctant to give timelines because it will hold the companies accountable in a very public way. When companies pledged to remove PVC and BFR, a couple of toxic substances, many came out with public timelines of when they planned to do it. The date passed when they said they would stop using these chemicals, and many of them are still using it. Kessler says they "probably don't want to repeat the public shaming" they got for the PVC/BFR debacle.
Kessler says that when you take a closer look at Samsung, they actually didn't do that well. "Samsung only scores 3/3 because of high use of post-industrial, since Samsung still has inefficient production generating a lot of off-cuts and scrap which can be re-used internally."
If Greenpeace didn't include pre-consumer recycled content, Samsung would have gotten a zero in the recycled content category as well.
So that brings me back to my original question: Why don't these companies use recycled plastic in their gadgets?
Apparently, it's more difficult for cell phone companies to use recycled plastic, since there are fewer opportunities to hide the recycled plastic inside the mobile phone. Recycled plastic looks different from so-called "virgin plastic," so when companies do use it, they try to stuff it away in a place that consumers won't notice.
Some companies are using recycled content from water bottles instead of from old electronic products, although it wasn't enough to score a point.
I love my Droid Eris, and I don't think I would love it any less if it looked a little different because it had recycled plastic. In fact, as an environmentalist, I would much rather have a phone made from recycled plastic.
I don't think I'm the only one who would like to have more electronics on the market made from recycled materials. How about you? Would you care if a phone looked a little different because it was made using recycled plastic?
Tags: Cell Phones, Electronics, Green Electronics, Materials, Plastic
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