Showing solidarity with growing environmental concerns, leading mobile manufacturer Nokia has recently announced bringing 40 new models of Nokia mobile phones that will be synthesized from biodegradable components. Though, the entire phone will not be green at this moment, but efforts will be made to make them all green, a media report said.

Biodegradable components will help the phones to be re-cycled allowing a greater potential to avert massive e-waste hazard, said experts. The new models from Nokia are expected to arrive in the market by end of this year. Major emphasis of the company now is to replace the traditional batteries with less toxic recyclable ones. Phone covers also will be made biodegradable at the initial stage itself. One of the easy ways to replace presently used non-renewable materials is to make use of polylactic acid (PLA) plastics and similar other biomaterials along with biomass-based modifiers like plants, etc., said experts. Significantly, Nokia has already stopped using polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in their phones.

In order to enhance company’s biodegradable capacity and to serve customers of Indian subcontinent better, Nokia is also planning to set up the refurbishment culture in India. All distributors of Nokia phones will receive green bins to collect old phones for recycling purposes. System for collecting used items similar to US may also be adopted for India in due course, in that users put their recyclable phones in pre-addressed envelope provided for the purpose and post free of cost to the company. The company is also aiming initiating an awareness campaign about using of biodegradable components and phones.