Phone Companies Agree On Environmental Friendliness, Or At Least A Press Release About It
from the now-with-53%-less-waste dept
There's been a growing trend for companies to "go green" for some time, with more and more companies announcing plans to make their products or processes more environmentally friendly. Today, a group of mobile-phone companies said they'd work together to make their products better for the environment by increasing recycling, decreasing the use of toxic and harmful materials, and attacking one of the environmental bugbears of just about any tech company: energy consumption. In this area, the companies say they'll take action by "equipping phones with reminders to unplug chargers once the battery is recharged", and say if just 10% of mobile phone users heeded the reminders, enough energy would be saved to power 60,000 European homes each year. That's all well and good, and these companies deserve some kudos for taking steps, no matter how small, but seeing as how they're technology companies, couldn't they maybe come up with some technology to help solve the problem, rather than just taking the path of least effort and changing the "battery charged" message phones already display? Why not change the way chargers work so they shut themselves off in some way, or find some other actual solution, instead of just displaying a relatively useless message that few users will probably see, or heed, anyway? As said above, it's great that companies take steps to alleviate the environmental impact of their products -- but it's even better when those steps are actually meaningful.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Stupid is as stupid does
Also, yeah...have the charger and phone communicate each other's status with one another kinda like a UPS does with a computer. This way they can charge intelligently.
Naturally this would raise costs initially though.
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Bah!
The average European home consumes 4667 kWh
So 60,000 homes would consume 280,020,00 KWh.
Thus the estimated 600M cell phones in the EU are
wasting 0.467 KWh per year or 0.053W ?
Turn off a lamp or something... geez.
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I missed the 10% but its' still lame.
enough for 60,000 homes it would be 10 times
as much or 0.53W still no big woopie.
Turn off that damn yard light...'k?
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Like I'm gunna wake up to unplug it.
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Re: A.C.'s comment
How true! My phone (and headset) get hooked up to charge at night while I am sleeping. I suspect VERY few people would ever be around to see the notice that it is fully charged.
A better idea would be making phones that DON'T DRAW POWER from the plug after they are charged! And as has been said before, get rid of the stupid "standby" mode that some new electronics have -- it wastes almost as much power as being on! Some of these new devices don't even have an OFF setting anymore, just a standby one -- you have to unplug them if you want to save power!
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Hmmm
Certainly reducing power consumption is good, but I can't imagine how many old cell phones there are out there. I have 4 old ones at home and I am not even a big gadget guy.
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Re:
at least understand what you're talking about.
the only way to do it is to have it turn off the charging and actually completely break the circuit and not allowing it to charge again until the user does something (presses a button, unplugs and plugs it back in, etc.), but then there's the problem about people using the phone *while* its plugged in. therefore, you *wouldn't* want it to turn off then, so then it'd have to detect whether its in use or not, etc, etc, etc.
its solvable, but not as simple as people think.
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lock Keypad?
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The waste is real, the mechanism different.
The energy waste they're talking about is the "phantom load" (another term you should look up) presented by the wall-wart when there's no phone connected to it. Ever notice that, even with no phone plugged in, the brick keeps itself a little above ambient temperature? That's a watt or two, 24/7, that you don't need to spend. Classic phantom load. Simply unplugging the charger WILL make a difference, and reminding users to do it MIGHT make them more proactive about other phantom loads.
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