The iPhone, Now in Green(er)

By Nancy Scola

Inside each of the more than one million 3G iPhones sold so far, you'll find a lithium-ion battery. No big surprise there. But what's different here from early model iPhones is that the batteries are not soldered in place. That's good news. It means that when your iPhone has a dead battery, you can simply get a new battery, rather than sending the whole thing back to corporate HQ, or dumping it in the trash. And speaking of trash, there's more good news on that front: an unsoldered battery makes a phone easier and more economical to dissemble and recycle.

But you wouldn't know all that from Apple's marketing. It took the gadget gurus over at iFixit to buy and quickly break down a 3G phone to get the scoop on the removable battery. In fact, you wouldn't know much at all about the new iPhone's greenness from Apple. I put a call into a company press contact, who walked me through apple.com to find a brief below-the-fold environmental impact statement on the new iPhone. (This is not exactly transparent backstory management.)

But while the new iPhone is far from sustainable, Apple's tucked-away impact statement points to definite improvements from the first generation to the second. Beyond the replaceable battery, the handset, headphones and USB cable are all now PVC-free. The circuit board is produced without bromine. The LCD is made sans mercury. And let's back up a bit -- buying a new iPhone might not even be necessary. The software 2.0 upgrade means that owners of first-gen phones don't even need to buy a 3G to get most of the newest functionality.

Apple has long had a reputation, deserved or otherwise, for lagging behind the rest of the computing industry when it comes to the environment. Two years ago Greenpeace launched a campaign to Green My Apple. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition has targeted the company with its Bad Apple campaign. Last April, Steve Jobs responded with a manifesto titled "A Greener Apple." In it, the CEO praised the company while establishing a commitment to quit using toxic chemicals and improve recycling.

Millions of pounds of electronic waste is generated in the U.S. each year, as we've documented here on Worldchanging. Much of the world's e-waste is shunted off to developing countries, creating landscapes that look like the trashed Earth in Pixar's "Wall-E." Producer take-back programs not only help solve what to do with that waste but also encourage producers to design for recyclability. Apple now takes back all cell phones, regardless of manufacturer, and has stated a commitment to recycle all of its North American e-waste in the United States.

This is all stuff Apple should be bragging about. We tech geeks obsessed over the details of the new iPhone 3G. Product images were examined with the loving care generally reserved for sonograms and release date was tracked as carefully as a due date. Battery life, the new app store, its $199 price tag and AT&T's new rate plans were hashed over. But iPhone's greenness rarely came up, if ever.

Do Apple's marketing wizards think that even their notoriously discerning and design-minded customers are unconcerned about the sustainability of the products they buy? Here, we're talking about smart baked-in design that reduces toxic exposure and waste -- much more game-changing than, say, a shiny but inefficient solar cell-phone charger -- but it seems that the latter type of "green products" often get more air time. Corporations are in the great position to educate consumers about paradigm-shifting ways of doing business. Until we're at a point when ethical, sustainable business practices are the standard and don't need to be shouted from the rooftops, it would be great to see a forward-thinking company like Apple push the edge of that envelope.

For more, don't miss Jeremy Faludi's four-part series on green IT in our archives.

Nancy Scola is a Brooklyn-based writer, blogger, and editor who focuses on the place where technology meets culture. She's worked in the past on Capitol Hill, in presidential politics, and in progressive radio.

Photo credit: flickr/Fr3d.org, licensed by Creative Commons
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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 11:40 AM)