Nokia 301 to be sold without charger to cut down on waste
Green IT news – by GreenWise staff
30th July 2013
The Nokia 301 is to become the first mass-market handset to be sold without a phone charger as part of an environmental move to cut down on unnecessary mains charging units flooding the market.
The Nokia 301 will be sold with only the USB charging cable in the first trial to see if customers who tend to purchase less expensive handsets are happy to buy them without a mains charger. The trial is part of mobile operator O2’s ‘Chargers Out of the Box’ initiative, which aims to take all chargers out of new phone boxes by 2015. So far Sony, HTC and Nokia with its Lumia 925 have joined the campaign, but to date have only tested the market with top-end smartphones without a charger.
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“We have trialled a series of flagship smartphones on Chargers out of the Box,” Bill Eyres, head of the O2’s Think Big sustainaiblity programme said. “Now we want to pilot a less expensive handset – to establish whether customers who tend to purchase these phones are more or less likely to need chargers than those of top-end phones.”
Eyres said that if the trial went well, O2 would work with its manufacturing partners to apply the scheme “more widely” across its range of phones.
The ‘Chargers out of the Box’ initiative was launched by O2 in 2012. In trials to date, 82 per cent of customers buying ‘Chargers of the Out of the box’ products decided the USB-cable was all that was required.
Research by O2 suggests that there are as many as 100 million unused chargers in the UK — a total of 18,700 tonnes of components that weigh as much as 1,000 London buses — that have a large environmental cost. The 124,274 miles of copper wire and plastic covering in chargers that are already in consumers’ hands would equate to a volume landfill the size of four Olympic swimming pools if discarded.
According to O2, at least 70 per cent of all existing mobile phone owners now have the interchangeable USB charging units that can be used with almost any handset. The mobile operator says that if all makers and networks joined the ‘Chargers out of the Box’ , up to 30 million chargers would be rendered unnecessary, the estimated total number of phones sold each year in the UK.
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