Tech Companies Need to Recycle and Reuse

Chances are, the gizmos you love using and owning are polluting the environment more than you might imagine. Your mobile phone, your trendy new iPad, the shiny iPod etc are all made from virgin plastic. This is because the tech companies that manufacture these gadgets don't want to use recycled materials.

Only Samsung Products are Green, To Some Extent
Greenpeace recently published its annual report in which it rated almost all tech companies very poorly in respect of their use of recycled materials. The "Green Gadget Guide" gave top marks to Samsung because 15 percent of its products are made from recycled materials. Samsung also has a schedule in place to increase this figure from 15 percent right up to 25 percent. Therefore, any company that has such a robust plan for using recycled materials is given top marks.

Samsung plans to make 25 percent of its goods from recycled materials in the near future. This includes pre and post-consumer plastic. As the name suggests, pre-consumer plastic is where the factory recycles its own waste and post-consumer plastic is sourced from consumers for example, used bottles that we send for recycling and so forth.

Only Samsung qualified for this, beating hundreds of other IT and tech giants in the process. Other organisations failed to make the grade just because they don't want to increase the amount of recycled materials they use. This would make them accountable to the public and they wanted to avoid this since they probably don't want a repeat of the public criticism they received following the PVC and BFR problem recently.

Even Samsung got pretty poor marks, actually, and what pulled them through was their robust recycling of post-industrial scrap. The other companies probably don't want to use recycled plastic in the products, like mobile phones, because it makes their products look different.

Recycled plastic looks a bit different from virgin plastic so companies will only use recycled materials in places that cannot be seen by the human eye. They might only use it inside mobile phones, for example, as it might interfere with the sleek and shiny look of the product if they use it extensively on the outside as well.

Please Recycle!
But the point they fail to realise is that many consumers are highly aware of the ecological disaster that awaits mankind if we don't recycle and reuse. Therefore, such consumers might buy recycled phones and some might even pay a premium for such products.

In fact, we would love to buy and use mobile phones and laptops that were made only from recycled materials. Wouldn't you?

Source by: www.arabia.msn.com