Eco-Friendly Phones

Courtesy of Richard Wool Credit: Dawn Marie Fiore This phone circuit board is made of soya oil and chicken feathers.

It's not just the plastic in phone covers that poses a problem; phone circuit boards made from glass fibre and oil-based plastics are hard to recycle and very wasteful to produce in the first place. Richard Wool, an engineer from Delaware University, has come up with a new formula for circuit boards - a combination of soya oil and chicken feathers. Not only are both these materials entirely natural and renewable, but if used, the technique could also find a use for unwanted chicken feathers. In the United States, wasted feathers weigh in at a billion kilograms a year, which is a lot of feathers to burn or bury. Roger Wise, a British materials scientist, has also suggested making circuit boards out of a new substance: pasta, or lasagne, to be precise. Roger eventually wants to use plant material to produce circuit boards, a move that could lead to a 'closed loop' for circuit board production: the products of the degradation of old circuit boards could be used to feed plants and make new ones.

Yet this still leaves a burning question: why do we have such a desire to keep up with the trends? If we didn't, we'd only be replacing our mobiles when necessary instead of every 12 to 18 months and there would be less of a need to make circuit boards out of chicken feathers. Perhaps producing timeless designs and methods of upgrading a phone's function without replacing a whole handset may be more effective. Although I would quite like a sunflower in my garden.

For more information:

Science Museum: Dead Ringers
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna/deadringers/

BBC News - Biodegradable phone is developed
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/coventry_warwickshire/4056687.stm