Smartphones aren’t necessarily known for being sustainable and environment friendly. But there are standards that organizations like UL Environment (a division of Underwriters Laboratories) a global safety science leader, set for OEMs and the devices they produce. The Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ are the first smartphones (and Samsung, the first OEM) to have received the ECOLOGO Gold certification to the ANSI/UL 110 Standard for Sustainability for Mobile Phones, which has actually been approved as the American National Standard by the Standards Technical Panel.
The certification, just recently approve as an ANSI standard last March 24, 2017, actually has new criteria, including:
– substitutions assessment;
– evaluation of post-consumer recycled and bio-based plastics content in accessories;
– reduction of energy consumption of battery charging systems;
– notification regarding and the identification of materials and components requiring selective treatment,
– and the availability of product Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) third-party verification
They have also updated some of their criteria, which includes
– evaluation of the post-consumer recycled and bio-based plastics content in the mobile phone;
– external power supply energy efficiency;
– evaluation of primary recyclers’ third-party certification;
– ease of disassembling the mobile phone;
– environmentally preferable paper/paperboard in point of sale packaging;
– and improved packaging efficiency;
The ECOLOGO certification now has three certification tiers: Gold, Silver, and Bronze. Since the two flagship devices fulfilled two of the new criteria included in ANSI/UL 110, they were able to achieve the gold certification. This is because their external power supply has a housing containing 20% post consumer recycled plastic content and also because Samsung conducted an LCA for the two devices based on 12 environmental impact categories.
SOURCE: Samsung
