Transform Together aims to improve the environmental and social impact of smartphones throughout their whole life cycle, from production (design, mining, manufacturing) to consumption (selling, purchasing, using) and end of life (repairing, reusing, recycling). Why work on smartphones? Smartphones are one of the most widely used consumer goods. By 2018, just over 36% of the world’s population is projected to use a smartphone - an estimated total of 2.5 billion. But the increased production and consumption of smartphones has dramatic drawbacks. At the mining and manufacturing stages, the production of smartphones is associated with environmental pollution, human rights violations, child labor, and hazardous working and living conditions putting at risk the health and life of workers and their communities. Besides, the lack of ecodesign*, rising overconsumption and poor levels of repair, reuse and recycling create an increasing amount of electronic waste which is harmful to people and the planet. No stakeholder on its own – business, government, civil society organization or consumer – can solve these problems. Transform Together is the only multi-stakeholder partnership to focus specifically on smartphones, covering their whole life cycle and addressing both their social and environmental impact. There is an urgent need for collaboration to advance the sustainable production and consumption of smartphones and the Sustainable Smartphone Working Group of Transform Together offers a new and unique platform to do so. Our approach
Transform Together has developed a comprehensive strategy with research, campaign and advocacy activities. The working group participants are currently advising and supporting Transform Together to tailor and implement these activities, while at the same time ensuring complementarity with their own work. At the moment, the participants are elaborating environmental and social sustainability criteria for smartphones, with the support of Transform Together’ secretariat. These criteria will be used to:
These activities will be implemented in an integrated approach to change consumers', businesses' and governments' behavior towards more sustainability. *Ecodesign is an approach to designing products with special consideration for the environmental impacts of the product during its whole lifecycle Comments are closed.
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July 2019
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