I also wrote a post this morning on the iPhone and it\’s place in Eco Fashion. I\’d be delighted to hear your thoughts on this front as well!
Thanks,
Haute Verte Couture
http://hautevert.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/new-iphone-and-eco-fashion/

“The iPhone 4 has [...] a larger battery that provides 7 hours of 3G talk, 6 hours of 3G browsing, 10 hours of WiFi browsing, 10 hours of video, and 40 hours of music. That larger battery means users don’t need to plug the phone in as much, which in turn means less overall power use.”

Now, these things aren’t all apples and oranges, and nor are they accurate. First of all, a larger battery doesn’t mean less power use — it means more power storage in the phone. Whether the iPhone 4 draws more or less power than its predecessors for doing the same tasks is only part of the equation of how long the battery lasts. With a battery sufficiently larger in capacity, a less efficient device may last longer. Second, plugging in less often doesn’t mean drawing less power! Again, it depends on how much power is drawn for how long; my wife only uses her hair dryer for a few minutes a few times a week, but my alarm clock is plugged in 24/7. Despite this, the hair dryer draws hundreds of times more energy in a month than the alarm clock. Rechargeable portable devices are beholden to the same accounting.

A second example: “Another practical and green benefit of the new iPhone: it’s 9.3mm thick — 25% thinner than the iPhone 3GS. A thinner phone means fewer resources go into making the product.” It is incontrovertibly true that the iPhone 4 is thinner than the 3GS. However, whether this means that there are fewer resources expended in making it depends on the materials going into it, the difficulty of their working, and the density of those materials within the device. Air space in a device uses far less resources than [non-semiconductor] silicon, which uses far less resources than aluminum — and so on.

Determining whether a gadget is “green” or not is a process which requires more than a little bit of off-the-cuff analysis of a press release by a writer. I think it is very important that consumers become more aware of the ecological, energy, and labor impact of the products they purchase, but this awareness needs to be founded in hard facts. Whether the iPhone 4 is of more or less ecological impact than the 3GS or even older iterations remains an open issue, and no one should make decisions based on an article such as this one.

What is absolutely true is that an iPhone of any type is far less efficient and sustainable than a well-engineered so-called “dumb”-phone. However, an iPhone is also much more efficient and sustainable than a dumb-phone PLUS an MP3 player PLUS a personal organizer and/or handheld game system. The point being, it’s important to look not only at the device itself, but the user’s needs (or perceived needs — nobody “needs” an iPhone) and the behavior modification that the device entails. Buying a single fancy phone of larger ecological impact every few years is probably better than rotating through a cadre of half a dozen portable devices of different purpose in that same time period.

Note that I don’t meant to single out this article, this author, or this product. I think the entire line of features would benefit from more careful materials, energy, and use-case analysis. That could take it from mildly interesting pseudoscience to a tool that could help people green their lifestyles and purchasing habits.

PVC-free handset
PVC-free headphones
PVC-free USB cable
Bromine-free printed circuit boards
Mercury-free LCD display
Arsenic-free display glass
Majority of packaging made from post-consumer recycled fiberboard and biobased materials
Power adapter outperforms strictest global energy efficiency standards