Products and the Environment
Motorola Mobility believes green design is an integral part of making better products. Every new product we make has green design principles built in.
Green by design
We assess the environmental impacts at each stage of our product lifecycle – supply chain, manufacture, distribution, use and end-of-life. Our aim is to cut the lifecycle footprint through green innovation at the design stage and by providing low-impact end-of-life solutions. As new green innovations become available, we seek to incorporate those features first in select products and then across our product portfolio.
We identify ways to make every product greener following these design principles:
- Use environmentally preferred materials
- Increase the amount of recycled materials used
- Improve energy-efficiency
- Reduce packaging
- Increase the recyclability of our products
For mobile devices and accessories these principles are captured in standard operating procedures (SOP’s). For our set-top and home broadband equipment, we published in 2011 a new “Design for the Environment” manual that reinforces the importance of green design and sets out practical ways to reduce lifecycle product impacts.
Improvements to our products
- Our focus on green design over more than a decade has produced significant reductions in lifecycle impact:
- Our current average phone charger in standby mode consumes 70 percent less energy than in 2000
- Our latest chargers use just 0.03 watts, which is 90 percent lower than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR standard
- Our average set-top box power consumes 50 percent less energy than 2005
- Our set-top boxes achieve 20 percent energy savings from one generation to the next
Life-cycle assessment
We use life-cycle assessment to highlight where the environmental impacts occur in the manufacturing, use and disposal of our products. This guides the focus of our environmental innovation effort as we research new materials and processes.
During 2012 we updated our life-cycle assessments to cover the DROID RAZR smartphone and the DROID XYBOARD 10.1 tablet. The results – shown in the charts – indicate that for both products the large majority of impact occurs in materials and manufacturing. In fact, manufacturing impacts accounted for 92% and 88% percent of the total product footprint for DROID RAZR smartphone and DROID XYBOARD 10.1 tablet, respectively. The overall impact for the tablet is greater than the smartphone reflecting its larger size and weight.
In future work we intend to focus on materials sourcing and manufacturing processes to gain a more detailed understanding of the individual components contributing to the overall impact in the phase of the life-cycle.
Comparison of CO2 burdens across the life-cycle of a smartphone and tablet
