Motorola has its fifth carbon neutral product with the W388
Motorola’s newest environmentally friendly phone, the MOTO™ W388 Renew+ has been certified CarbonFree® by the Carbonfund.org. In order to be certified CarbonFree, products have to meet stiff requirements. The product must be carbon neutral over its entire lifecycle from manufacturing through recycling.
The MOTO™ W388 Renew+ was manufactured using Motorola’s environmentally sound design factors:
• Use environmentally-preferred materials
• Increase the amount of recycled materials
• Improve energy efficiency
• Reduce packaging
• Increase the recyclability of our products
• Go beyond compliance
The phone is polyvinyl chloride (PVC) free and brominated flame retardant (BFR) free. The casing is made from recycled water cooler bottles. Besides using recycled materials the company also provides a recycling program for its phones when they are no longer useful.
Other environmental features include an energy efficient charger and third party certification for its CarbonFree status. Motorola worked with “a third-party consultant to calculate the emissions resulting from the entire life-cycle of the product, including use and recycling.” In order to assure carbon neutrality, Motorola has partnered with Carbonfund.org’s “third-party validated renewable energy and reforestation carbon reduction projects.”
“The integrity, strength, transparency and rigor of the CarbonFree® Product Certification Program has provided Motorola value in bringing carbon neutral electronics products to market,” said Bill Olson, Director, Office of Sustainability and Stewardship, Motorola Mobile Devices. “Teaming with Carbonfund.org has helped us offer consumers a product such as Renew that has eco-friendly attributes including post-consumer recycled content plastic, eco-conscious packaging, energy-efficient performance and CarbonFree® certification.”
Being carbon neutral is terrific but how good is the phone really? The MOTO™ W388 Renew+ has earned “best-in-class talk time” and uses Motorola’s CrystalTalk™ technology to improve voice quality. Although the phone only has 7.5MB of on board memory it will support an up to 2GB external memory card. The camera is nothing to write home about since it is only VGA with a 4X zoom.
The phone was released as an entry level phone with modest features like the VGA camera and FM radio, but lacks features found in higher end phones like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It fills the slot that it was intended for while being environmentally friendly on both the front and back ends.
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