GLOBAL – Welcome to the first ever poll on Nokia Conversations! Each week we’ll be asking you to vote on hot topics. The ambition is that your responses will help steer some of what we write about here – no doubt there will be controversial consensuses and surprise results, both of which will lead us to probe deeper and write follow-up stories on the subjects that interest you most.
Plus, of course, we want you to suggest poll questions (visit our suggest a topic page) – questions you’d like seen answered by the Nokia Conversations community. So to kick things off we thought we’d run a poll on eco phones and ask what do you think is most important?
ISTANBUL, Turkey – Nokia is tremendously aware that improving sustainability and raising eco awareness, when it comes to mobile devices, can’t solely be addressed with the introduction of environmentally-minded products and practices – it has to stretch further than this, both internally, externally via projects such as we:recycle, and more gradually through the education of children and projects such as the recent Dreams Workshop recycle-themed art exhibition in Turkey.
Read on to find out more about the Recycling Dreams exhibition, and click through to see a gallery of the artwork created by the kids involved.
LONDON, England – Quietly dropping onto the UK Nokia online store comes this Nokia N79, sporting free Xpress-on smart covers, a free Ngage game, a £4 donation to WWF and…. no charger! We wrote about Nokia’s plans to ship devices without chargers, therby allowing much smaller packaging, back in December at Nokia World and when Mike wrote about batteries the month before.
LONDON, England - Since yesterday’s story about recycling in India, and more pertinently, Ripul’s comments and feedback on it, I’ve been thinking more about the whole area of phone recycling (and what I’m going to do with the bag of phones languishing in my cupboard). One thing I’ve come across previously (but not paid much attention to) are companies who will pay you good money for your old phone, before recycling it, refurbishing it and breaking it down for parts. ShP is, by it’s own claim, the first of these and also one which I’ve just noticed has a new twist on it – offering up the money you’d have got your phone to charity.
INDIA – We wrote previously about Nokia’s recycling survey conducted last year, and Charlie picked up on it again with his Best of 2008 piece over the holidays. Now Nokia India has taken up the baton and launched an initiative to drive awareness of recycling old handsets across the country. 1300 Nokia care centres and priority dealers are being equipped with recycling bins to take back old devices, regardless of who made them, before being taken away to be disposed of properly.
LONDON, England – Earlier this year we were treated to the news of how Nokia’s shift in packaging strategy was going to result in a massive reduction in the number of trucks on the road, reduced use of paper and the additional bonus of incredible cost savings. Not only is the shift good for the environment, it helps the bottom line too. We’ve already seen the result of this coming through, with some of the packaging for devices diminishing in size (and looking much better for it too, in my opinion).
GLOBAL – There is no doubt that the past few years have seen a resurgence in environmental consciousness from consumers and businesses. And, indeed, Nokia has been working hard to expand all their recycling activities. Ranging from access to awareness to a cool video (see after jump), it’s been a banner year for mobile phone recycling.
GLOBAL – 2008 was the year that saw mobile phone chargers become a serious talking point and their shortfalls actively and openly addressed. The lifeblood of our devices, phone chargers have in many cases been rightly demonized for wasting energy, but this year we’ve witnessed the beginnings of a revolutionary change.
ADDIS ABEBA, Ethiopia – Nokia has as history of getting deeply involved with local initiatives in crises situations across the globe, including Africa where it worked with the Red Cross in Ghana to assist with the long-term repairing of communities hit by the floods of 2007 and the civil turmoil in Kenya earlier this year. Most recently Nokia, Nokia Siemens and Save the Children Finland have formed a partnership to build and deliver a sustained strategy for helping families in the area of Alaba Special Woreda in central Ethiopia, where drought has imposed terrible adversity on local children.
BARCELONA, Spain – Would you buy a phone over the counter, if it didn’t come in a box? That’s just one of the ideas the environmental people at Nokia are looking at, taking the move to smaller, more efficient, packaging to its very logical conclusion. I don’t think it’d work myself, but I’ve no doubt we’ll end up somewhere between that and the packs we currently see shipping.
Comments (6)