How ‘green’ is your phone?

• Mar. 1 by Clare Anne (2)

These days everything from your food, your car, and your clothes are ‘going green’. Even your house can jump on the proverbial band-wagon and undergo an ‘eco’ make over.

But what about the one thing we are all glued to: our mobile phones?

While everyone will tell you they want to reduce their ‘carbon footprint’, it seems like just greenwash as they are less than willing to put one of the biggest contributors to once side and just write a nice letter.

But fear not! For those of you with an iPhone, Apple have launched a range of ‘green apps’ sure to get you bitten by the ‘eco’ bug without having to brake the bank – the most expensive ‘app’ costs only £5.99  so there is really no excuse to not snap them up.

The Top 10 ‘apps’

The Top 10 ‘green apps’, as complied by The Guardian, features GoodGuide (free); your shopping guardian angel with a database of over 50,000 products, it allows users to scan the products and tells you its “environmental and social credentials”.

The rather handy greenMeter (£3.49); uses the phone’s ‘accelerometer’ to see just how efficient you really are at driving.

Does anyone remember the Top Gear episode where they went on an ‘eco-drive’? Well this is the sort of thing this ‘app’ encourages.

So no more being ‘trigger happy’ with the old accelerator, although, what this app doesn’t tell you is that its far cheaper (and lets face it, easier) to just empty your boot and check your type pressures.

And for all you ‘twitchers’ out there; how about downloading Chirp! Bird Songs of Britain and Europe (1.79), to test out your knowledge of bird songs on its ‘Name That Tune’ style game

User Reviews

So that’s three of the ‘apps’ in brief but how good are they? Birmingham Recycled asked a few iPhone users in the West Midlands to test them to find out.

Sarah Ford, 20, from Kings Heath, Birmingham says:

“I found GoodGuide very useful.

As a synchronised swimmer I need to eat healthily and this app looks at nutritional information on food.

While it was useful I don’t think I would keep up using it, mostly due to lack of time.”

She also tested the Pollution and Sceptical Science ‘apps’, adding:

“I found both of these ‘apps’ not so good because they were rather complex, crammed with lots of scientific knowledge and not very user friendly.”

So while The Guardian, and Apple, rate all these ‘apps’ it seems that while the intentions are there; there is still a long way to go before checking GoodGuide before you buy your shopping becomes second nature.