iFixit has made a name for itself online by taking apart just about every new gadget that hits the market. But better than that, they also offer the parts and tools required to carry out repairs on your devices without incurring expensive service charges. Now iFixit has teamed up with HealthyStuff.org to teardown smartphones in a different way: by bombarding them with X-rays to find out how toxic they are.
The iFixit/HealthyStuff team subjected the components of 36 smartphones to X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, which bombards the parts with high-energy X-rays to allow for a chemical analysis and chemical composition breakdown for each material used. Each phone then had its components rated based on how toxic they turned out to be, and the results totaled to give an overall rating. The higher that rating, the more toxic a phone is.
The results can be seen in the table below:
iPhone users can be happy in the knowledge that Apple performs very well placing the iPhone 4Sand iPhone 5 in the top 6. The iPhone 2G performed the worst of the bunch, but that just shows how much work Apple has put into making their devices more environmentally friendly in recent years.
Samsung manages to get two phones, the Captivate and Evergreen, in the top 6, with the popular and most recent Galaxy S3 $249.99 at Amazon Wireless only managing a medium rating. HTC only manages medium ratings, as does Blackberry and Nokia.
The top rated phone though, is the Motorola Citrus, which achieved a score of 2.56. That shouldn’t come as a surprise as Motorola designed it as an eco-friendly phone using no PVC or BFRs and only using recycled plastic in its construction.
If you visit the HealthyStuff.org link given below you can see a detailed breakdown of the chemicals used in each phone. It’s also worth pointing out that regardless of which phone you use, the best thing you can do when replacing it with a new one is to recycle it. In most cases the phone can be reused by someone else or the components reclaimed for reuse.
No comments :
Post a Comment