What are eco-sustainable smartphones and how to find them

The pioneers, when theapproccio green it was not an urgency (or perhaps it already was, but few perceived it as such), they were Apple e Fairphone. Worlds very distant from each other in terms of size, business, production and financial capacity: on the one hand the giant of the Apple, on the other an almost visionary Dutch company with the project of making smartphones produced respecting the rights of workers, with raw materials from certified sources , easy to disassemble and repair already based on the basic design.

Today Fairphone, the ethical smartphone as they call it, has reached its fourth generation. The other models are discontinued, although something online – especially for the Fairphone 3+ – can be found. And finally it also offers the user a qualitative leap in terms of performance and software. Staying with the aspects that interest us, and without going into the technical data sheet, thesupportive aluminum of the Aluminum Stewardship Initiative network comes from certified manufacturers, the back cover is in 100% recycled plastic, the gold is Fairtrade certified and more and more efforts are being made for the lithium and cobalt used in batteries. Obviously in the package there are no chargers or earphones, just like many mainstream producers have decided to do in recent times. Among other things, Fairphone 4 is “waste neutral», that is to say that for every piece purchased the company – which is a certified B Corp – is committed to recycle or refurbish an old phone. It starts from 579 euros and the cuts are from 128 or 256 GB for 6 or 8 GB of Ram. Ah: the warranty and service are guaranteed for five years.

Apple, as we said, does not fear lessons from anyone from this point of view. The group operates a zero impact and by 2030 all the products it will put on the market will be too. Stopping at iPhone 13, just think that the 100% gold in the logic board platings and the camera cable is recycled, the rare earth (17 central chemical elements also from a geopolitical point of view) of all the magnets are recycled as well as the tungsten in the Taptic Engine and the pond for soldering of logic board and battery management unit. As a result, the use of recycled materials in the iPhone 13 prevented the extraction of 2.6 million tons of rock containing the virgin metals. The most striking example, broadening the gaze to all the products of the Apple, however, concerns thealuminum: Apple devices with aluminum shells already contain a part of recycled material but the goal is to get to use it 100% for all devices by 2030. For this Cupertino has developed a special 100% recycled aluminum alloy which can be reused indefinitely while maintaining unchanged performance and robustness. An invention that made it possible to use only recycled aluminum for the body of many devices. And when the company has to resort to virgin material, it mainly sources from foundries powered by low greenhouse gas emissions, such as hydroelectricity, in order to further reduce our environmental impact. But the list of measures and standards is still very long, just think of the work on chemicals or on water.