Hello everybody.

This is the first of my living lightly posts. I am trying to find more sustainable, Eco-friendly ways of living.

The first thing I have been looking into involves reducing the impact of my mobile phone.

Firstly the mobile phone itself. I really hate the fact that it is so tempting to upgrade things like mobile phones whenever a new model comes out. Even if the old one is sent off for reuse/recycling, if it still works fine why get rid of it at all?  And I’m not convinced that the    phones don’t end up being sent to third world countries for breaking up where the dangerous elements are released without proper safeguards for the health of the workers or the environment. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I will keep my current mobile phone for as long as it works and then research the best way to dispose of it and look into ‘green’ mobiles for the replacement.

 In the past it has always been that the battery stops holding a charge and, when I enquire about a replacement battery, that model is no longer made. Therefore a whole phone has to be discarded rather than just the battery. I find this extremely irresponsible on behalf of the   phone manufacturers and would be interested to hear if anyone knows of any companies who have a better environmental ethos.

 The other things I am now doing are trying to reduce the electrical power needed to keep my phone charged and extending the life of the battery and the phone itself.

I have changed the following settings on my phone to conserve power:

1. Turned down the brightness to its lowest level.

2. De-activated the scrolling photos wallpaper to a plain one.

3. Changed the ringtones to the factory installed ones rather than having downloaded music ones.

4. Switched off the vibrate and led light notifications.

5. Switched off the keystroke sound.

6. Set the screen timeout to the minimum.

7. When I’m somewhere I’m not allowed to use my phone I switch it off rather than just to silent.

8. I intend to clean my phone carefully inside and out from time to time. Apparently dust build-up can reduce battery life.

I will no longer leave it charging overnight, even if it still has quite a lot of power left in it. I will only charge it when it goes down to 10% unless I know I’m going to be unable to charge it when I might need it. (Hardly ever). Apparently this is better for the life off the battery than continually topping it up.

I will stop leaving the charger plugged in and switched on even when nothing is charging. 95% of the energy is still drawn from the supply even when nothing is plugged in!

I have also been looking into alternative technologies for charging up electronic devices. There are now solar powered, wind powered and wind up chargers. The best one I’ve seen is a Kinetic energy charger which gets it’s power from the movement of your body when walking, cycling or running! It’s a bit expensive though, so I might need to save up for it. My husband is a keen cyclist so it is tempting to attach something to him or his bike to store up his energy.

I need to do a bit more research into these devices and I will report my findings. If anyone has any experience of using these I’d love to hear from you. Also any other ideas about green mobile phone use would be very welcome too.

Next time I think I will tackle the thorny issue of plastic bags…..