Did you know that your mobile phone can have an ecological rating that indicates its degree of sustainability from its manufacture and throughout its useful life? To find out, you must look at its Eco Rating index: we explain what it is and what it is for.
What are green scores?
Green Points are ratings that assess a brand’s or product’s sustainability performance, either as an aggregate score or broken down into categories. Rating scales range from 1 to 100, Poor to Excellent, using color-coding systems or providing buying advice. Similarly, they can indicate that a product should be “avoided.”
This score has been made in collaboration with different experts, and mobile is one of the main markets where it is currently applied. They usually focus only on environmental impact, but some also take social impact or animal welfare into account.
Sustainability level of your mobile
The green rating looks at new mobile phones and ranks them, as we’ve said, into five categories. They are the following:
- Durability: The longer your phone (and battery) lasts, the longer it will take to be recycled or disposed of.
- Repairability: Your phone should not only be easy to repair, but it should also have the potential to be upgraded to last as long as possible.
- Recyclability: When the phone’s useful life is over, is it easy to recycle, or are its parts not suitable for reuse?
- Climate efficiency: Is the manufacturer doing everything possible to reduce carbon emissions from the very beginning of the manufacture of the phone?
- Resource efficiency: In addition to recycling its parts in the future, does the phone use recycled materials, or is it depleting natural resources?
Stages of a mobile
In addition to evaluating all these areas we have just mentioned, the smartphone is also analyzed from a temporal perspective. That is, from when it begins to be assembled in the factory until we discard it.
- Raw materials: For example, are certain rare minerals needed to make a particular mobile phone?
- Manufacturing: 80% of the total CO₂ emissions in manufacturing a phone are generated even before it leaves the factory.
- Transportation: There are also CO₂ emissions since it leaves the factory and is transported by sea, air, or road to the stores.
- Usage and parts: How long will the phone last, and how often will you need to change parts?
- End of life: what happens when it’s time to take my phone off the road? We must know if it will end up as garbage or can be recycled.
How to find out the Eco Rating of my mobile phone?
As with other indicators, the Eco Rating can already be found in the specifications of new devices. Many brands participate in this score; You have to look at their websites to find this information among the characteristics of each model.
OPPO, Huawei, ZTE, OnePlus, and many Chinese firms are some of the manufacturers that give sustainability the most importance. Betting on the preservation of the environment is, in many cases, a sales plus derived from the improvement of the brand’s corporate image.
Also Read: The Best 5G Smartphones Available In 2022
