A Greener Take on the Smartphone Is Coming to Europe’s Biggest Carrier
Fairphone is hoping a wave of consumer sentiment and Vodafone as a powerful partner will help it sell more of its greener smartphones.
The new Fairphone.
Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg
As far as human rights and the environment are concerned, smartphones are a nightmare. They’re packed with metals mined in war zones. They’re built in working conditions it would be generous to call questionable. They’re difficult to repair. And they’re really hard to recycle upon their planned obsolescence, meaning they quickly add to the world’s growing pile of toxic electronic waste. For six years, a company in Amsterdam has been trying to break that cycle. Finally, Eva Gouwens says, people are starting to take notice.
Gouwens is the chief executive officer of Fairphone, whose modular designs make its smartphones relatively easy to repair—or to upgrade in an effort to extend their lives beyond those of the average iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. Gouwens’s latest model, the $495 Fairphone 3, is made partly from ethically sourced metals and recycled plastics. (Fairphone wouldn’t say how much its assembly-line workers in Suzhou, China, make hourly except that they get a $1.65 bonus per completed phone.) While the company has sold only 175,000 of its first two models since 2013, compared with the 1.6 billion phones other manufacturers sold around the world just last year, the Fairphone 3 is getting a big boost from a once-reticent partner: Vodafone Group Plc, Europe’s biggest wireless carrier.