Moto says hello to sustainability

If Motorola really wants to win big brownie points in Greenbang’s book, it should think about stop putting that annoying “hello moto” ringtone on its mobiles. Every time Greenbang hears it, she wants to rip the offending phone out of its owner’s hands and beat them with it until they resemble human bolognaise sauce.

In the meantime, it’s mitigating its affects on Greenbang’s environment through its corporate sustainability efforts, detailed in a report out this week.

Greenbang’s had a read through and this is what she found:

Long-term objectives for our products
We are working toward these long-term objectives for
our products:
. Achieve better than 90 percent recyclability
. Use more than 20 percent recycled material content
. Achieve high energy efficiency
. Use environmentally preferred materials
. Minimize the ratio of packaging material to product volume

Greenbang likes the bits with metrics attached, not so sure about the vague wording of the rest. And there’s more:

Motorola’s climate-change strategy
By 2010, we will reduce carbon dioxide emissions from our operations by 15 percent per million dollars of sales, compared with 2005. As a member of the Chicago Climate Exchange, we also have committed to a 6 percent reduction in our absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 2010, compared with 2000.
We will achieve these reductions by:
. Improving energy management at our operations
. Using more renewable energy
We also aim to increase the energy efficiency of our products and to develop more climate-friendly products.
In 2008, we will measure the environmental impact of employee business travel and will establish a Motorola-wide methodology for measuring the carbon footprint of our products.

Of all the green bits and bobs Greenbang read, she thinks she likes this one best:

In 2007, Motorola launched MOTOPOWER, a project to bring renewable energy and business opportunities to women in Uganda. We have established 55 solar-powered kiosks that are run by local women and that offer free mobile phone charging and sell operator SIM cards (portable memory chips that identify mobile subscribers). This effort is helping to increase mobile phone ownership in a country with one of the lowest levels of electricity supply in Africa. The kiosks also provide repair services and operate as a local “phone booth.”

And the bit she likes the least? Motorola claiming there’s something inherently green about having a device with a lot of features in it: the logic of “there’s a calculator function on your phone! So you don’t need a separate device!” doesn’t exactly seem like a major environmental commitment, really.

You want the report? You want it? You can have it! It’s here.