How green is the iPhone?

By George Wong on 04/20/2011, filed in Home > Apple

Well thanks to the folks over at Geekaphone, you won’t have to do the research yourself. They’ve come up with a handy infographic to let us know how friendly the iPhone is to the environment. So how green is the iPhone? Well, it definitely doesn’t rank up there as one of the greenest phones available (Nokia owns a handful of those titles with their Symbian phones), but it’s not terrible either.

View the complete infographic at Geekaphone’s website. Here are some of the highlights of the infographic:

300,000 workers in China earn less than $10 a day assembling iPhones.
iPhones purchased in 2010 contributed to 2350 million kg of CO2 being released into the atmosphere: 57% production, 34% consumer use, 8% transportation, 1% recycling.
If all the iPhones sold in 2010 were charged once it would be equal to leaving a normal light bulb on for over 357 years.
Less than 10% of phones are recycled (42,300,000 trashed, 4,700,000 recycled) even though Apple offers free and environmentally sensitive recycling of its phones.
The iPhone emits 1.19 w/kg SAR radiation: just under 2 1/2 times lower than the level causing behavioral changes in animals.
The original iPhone contained the hazardous chemicals PVC and bromine

While most of the stats don’t paint the phone in a good light, it’s comforting to know that Apple offers free and environmentally sensitive recycling of its phones, and its power adaptor exceeds global energy efficiency standards. How many of you recycled your iPhones before you upgraded?

Apple Inc: Apple Inc was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne as a computer company wich is often credited to have initiated personal computing. After a meteoric rise in the 80s, Apple had lost the personal computing battle against Microsoft and others in the 90s. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, the company came back to profitability by focusing on less products and started using industry-standard components. Apple's largest business is now in the smartphone space, with the iPhone representing more than half of the revenues and an even larger part of the profits. Read our Apple product reviews to see what the company has been up to: iPhone 5 Review, Macbook Pro with Retina display review

iOS: was once upon a time called iPhone OS, or "operating system", which is the software that provides all the basic device functionality and is the interface between the hardware and applications. iOS was introduced with the iPhone on January 9 2007, and it was originally not intended to be programmable by third parties. Steve Jobs had envisioned that developers could create Web Apps that would run in the browser. This changed less than one year after when the iPhone SDK (software development kit) was introduced in October 2007. Today, hundreds of thousands of apps have been created for this platform. iPhone OS became iOS on June 2010. Interestingly, both iPhone and iOS were former trademarks of Cisco, that Apple now uses under a license.

iPhone: iPhone: The iPhone is Apple's line of smartphones. That was also the original name of the first iPhone, which was announced on January 9th 2007 by Steve Jobs during the Macworld Keynote. The iPhone was released to the public in June of the same year. The development of the iPhone started in 2004, was internally called "project purple" and was the fruit of a collaboration between Apple and AT&T. Since then, Apple has released new iPhone models every year, with the iPhone 3G in July 2008, the iPhone 3GS in June 2009, the iPhone 4 in June 2010, the iPhone 4S in October 2011 and the iPhone 5 in September 2012. The iPhone represented more than half of Apple's revenues in 2012.

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