Sunflower Phones?

"Scientists Make Phone That Turns Into a Sunflower

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Scientists said on Monday they have come up with a cell phone cover that will grow into a sunflower when thrown away.

Materials company Pvaxx Research & Development, at the request of U.S.-based mobile phone maker Motorola (NYSE:MOT - news), has come up with a polymer that looks like any other plastic, but which degrades into soil when discarded.

Researchers at the University of Warwick in Britain then helped to develop a phone cover that contains a sunflower seed, which will feed on the nitrates that are formed when the polyvinylalcohol polymer cover turns to waste.


"It's a totally biodegradable and non-toxic plastic," said Pvaxx spokesman Peter Morris.


"This is the first product that we've made public. We're working with blue chip companies and will introduce several products next year," he said, adding it would be used in electronics, horticulture, ammunition and household cleaning.


The company's new plastic, which was created over the past five years but was in development for longer, can be rigid or flexible in shape.


Some 650 million mobile phones will be sold this year, and most of them will be thrown away within two years, burdening the environment with plastics, heavy metals and chemicals. A biodegradable cover can offer some relief for nature, Warwick University said.


Motorola said it had not yet decided if it would introduce a model built with the new plastic, and that it would take until at least the second quarter of 2005 to get a commercial product.

"(To improve) the quality (of the plastic) is something we're working on," said Motorola project manager Peter Shead, adding the new plastic may be used in snap-on covers first.

Many young consumers buy cheap and interchangeable plastic covers to personalize their standard phone."

This is for all you treehuggers out there. Science has finally listened to you.

Biodegradable plastics have been around for a LONG time, and been discussed here before.

The idea of implanting a seed is new to me though.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight



*Zerinity*

Originally posted by Zerinity
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight



*Zerinity*

Please don't spam, and don't post unless you can contribute or have something worthy of saying.



Awsome idea. Good to see that people are starting to care more and more for the enviroment. One problem with the idea is that people will probably forget that their phone is good to the enviroment so some of the people will end up throwing them in their average garbage bags, but I'm sure most will throw them in their gardens or nearby parks.

What were those Amsterdam scientists smoking when they thought of that.

Originally posted by VirusClock
One problem with the idea is that people will probably forget that their phone is good to the enviroment so some of the people will end up throwing them in their average garbage bags, but I'm sure most will throw them in their gardens or nearby parks.

What difference does that make? You do realize that if they just threw them in the ditch the trash would still be there for quite some time, right?

The issue is that the landfills are filled with plastics that aren't going to disappear for a thousand years, and with biodegradables these landfills will be more akin to hills than hills filled with plastic.

Originally posted by VirusClock
Awsome idea. Good to see that people are starting to care more and more for the enviroment. One problem with the idea is that people will probably forget that their phone is good to the enviroment so some of the people will end up throwing them in their average garbage bags, but I'm sure most will throw them in their gardens or nearby parks.

Oh, lets just hope for the environment's sake that the folks who buy these phones DON'T plant them in their gardens or nearby parks. Great...someone made a bio-degradeable plastic case, but that's only the case. Keep in mind that a cell phone's chips and circuit boards are highly toxic. Unless the hippy-dippy customer that plants his phone in his back yard wants to toxify his garden soil, he'd better disassemble the phone, carefully recycle the chips and circuit board at a local retailer and then plant the empty phone case.

The Toxic Content of Cell Phones and Other Electronic Devices

How Cell Phones Add a Toxic Twist to Our Landfill Problems

Toxicity of Cell Phone Waste

We're talking about interchangeable covers, not the whole phone..

The whole debate the so called tree hugers have with trash is pointless.
In the very near futcher we the humans of earth will have no other choice but to recycle most of the trash. the landfills of today are the mines of the futcher.
we are using up resorces of earth very quickly and the rare earth minirals that are in your cellphone or pc or car or even lighter can be recycled and once it becomes cheeper to recycle then to creat from scrach then we will start recycling on a massive scale even up to the point of digging up old land fills.
the realy cool thing is in a twist of irony the rare earth minirals will now be much more constrated then ever before. Now it can take tons or dirt to filterout pounds of the miniral you want but with a land fill this changes and the amounts you will get will be much higher. prossesing a ton of land fill will yeald you 100dreds of pounds of manny typs of rare earth minirals.
the only thing needed is the tek to prosses it and I assure you we can make the tek its no harder then making the tek to filter it out of plane earth. But at this point that tek is alread here and the cost of converting over is high and it would be ten years minum untill you would make a profet. This is why it hasent already been done.

Originally posted by Croat56
What were those Amsterdam scientists smoking when they thought of that.

I'm guessing they weren't smoking anything at all except maybe some Sun Flowers!!

If they were smoking something else I can assure you they would have been aware of their other options of what kinds of seeds to be putting in those phones!!