Motorola Misses Greenpeace's Toxic Target

The environmental campaign group, Greenpeace has repeated its condemnation of Motorola for missing targets to cease the use of toxic chemicals inside its cellphones. The comments came as Dell Computers announced plans to remove key toxic chemicals from its PCs laptops and other products and to move to 'clean production'. Hewlett Packard, LGE, Nokia, Samsung, Sony and Sony Ericsson have already made commitments to eliminate the use of some hazardous chemicals in the near future.

However, Greenpeace named Motorola as the only one of the top five mobile manufacturers which has failed to commit to removing toxic components, and has recently been downgraded in Greenpeace's industry ranking, after backtracking on earlier commitments.

Back in October 2005 Greenpeace congratulated Motorola for joining the good guys when they made toxic clean-up promises. In a July 2005 letter, Motorola committed to phase out all toxic brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in its mobile phones by mid 2007 and to provide a phase out date for the hazardous plastic PVC by March 2006. But after follow-up talks on their progress Greenpeace says that it received a letter on 15 May 2006 stating that Motorola cannot phase out BFRs and PVC from their products.

Motorola's letter offers several reasons for not keeping their promise. But the campaign group says that other mobile phone companies have shown progress rather than excuses. Sony Ericsson has already removed BFRs from all their models except one. Nokia has already removed PVC in all new models and all new components will be free of BFRs from 1st January 2007.

Both LG electronics and Samsung are currently behind on their promises but still working towards elimination of these toxic chemicals.

A number of other companies including Acer, Apple, Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM, Lenovo, Panasonic, Siemens and Toshiba have so far failed to commit to Greenpeace's campaign."

Posted to the site on 27th June 2006