If you care about the environment at all, disposing of electronics is seldom a simple task. You can't just throw them in the trash bin, and recycling them often costs a chunk of cash -- if you can even find a place to do it. If you're lucky, there's an electronics store near you with promotional free-recycling days, or, if the piece of electronics in question is a cell phone, you can find a nearby donation drop-off for a charity.
Why the hassle? Electronics components, and cell phones especially, are made of dangerous substances. A mobile phone is made of hundreds of different substances, some of which are toxic, including PVC, phthalates, zinc, lead, brominated flame retardants and arsenic [source: Reedy]. When a cell phone ends up in a landfill, it sits there, and sits there, sometimes for hundreds of years, giving those toxic substances lots of time to leach into the ground and water supply.
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Thus the focus on recycling or donating your mobile phone -- beyond conserving manufacturing resources, it's crucial keep it out of a landfill. But more than 80 percent of the 150 million phones discarded each year still end up in the trash [source: Wenzel].
In response to heavy criticism, the mobile-phone industry has begun to focus heavily on greening up its product. In 2006, Nokia introduced a whole line of phones and accessories free of PVC, and in 2008, the company marketed the first phone with no toxic flame retardants [source: Reedy]. LG removed harmful beryllium from its phones and is researching both environmentally friendlier paints and biodegradable plastics for its products [source: Reedy]. It's not an easy process, since eco-friendly plastics are still a new industry and are not always as sturdy as the traditional stuff [source: Reedy].
All of the top handset makers are getting in on the "green phone" trend to varying degrees. In this article, we'll look at five of the best examples of eco-friendlier phones and find out what makes them greener than their traditional counterparts.
At No. 5, we've got a phone from Sony with a reduced carbon footprint.