Green Mobile hopes to make ‘sunflower phone’ a reality

Mobile phone addicts with an eco conscience, walk this way.

Launched yesterday, Green Mobile is an eco-minded network, landline and broadband provider that promises to raise money for green charities and teach us a bit more about the environmental impact of our phones.

As well as giving £25 when you sign-up to its two launch charities - Friends of the Earth and Woodland Trust - Green Mobile promises to donate 6 per cent of your monthly bill to the pair, so the more you natter, the more money gets donated.

Prices, surprisingly, don't look bad, with 22p/minute for other networks and 5p texts. Virgin Mobile, by comparison, charges 35p for calls to other networks and 10p for texts. 

The new green telco could also be the first company to make the University of Warwick's 'sunflower phone' into a mobile you can actually buy. At concept stage for the past two years, the phone's case will biodegrade if chucked in soil, with a hiddden sunflower seed in the case causing a sunflower to grow in the mobile's resting place. Green Mobile suggests the innards might be made from lasange circuit boards, a nod to an idea mooted in last year's Science Museum exhibition, Dead Ringers.

One of the other nice ideas from the provider - which is run by Resource Utilities and piggy-backs on T-Mobile's network - is that when you join, it discourages you from taking a mobile upgrade for at least a year. As it points out, one billion mobiles are manufactured globally each year with only 15% being recycled and 11,250 tonnes of unused mobile phones sitting in drawers across the UK.

The only real rival I know of is ThePhoneCo-Op, which doesn't offer the mobile part of the equation, but does offset its emissions.