[The Environment]

We've seen green laptops make it to the market, but have you ever seen a green mobile phone? It's a little hard to imagine, but a few forward-thinking inventors have already taken the first steps in creating a new industry. Take these few very interesting prototypes:

#1 - A bamboo handset, created by Danish product designer Gert-Jan van Breugel. When the time comes to discard it, just plant it in a garden instead of disposing it in a landfill. Bamboo seeds in the handset will sprout into shoots as the biodegradable phone disintegrates. This is a possible solution for the mobile phone disposal problem, as most discarded mobile phones end up in landfills in developing countries.

The phone also does away with the need for a charger -- it's powered by turning a crank at the back of the phone.

#2 - "Blue Earth," by Samsung, a handset that contains non-hazardous materials and made out of recycled water bottles. It is powered by solar energy, and for a green phone, it has a lot of the features that can give its non-green counterparts a run for its money.

#3 - "MOTO W233 Renew," by Motorola, a completely-recyclable handset. (Even its packaging is made of 100% recycled paper.)

#4 - "GreenHeart," a concept phone by Sony Ericsson, with an energy-efficient charger and biodegradable parts. Its instruction manual is also electronic, which does away with the use of paper.

#5 - Nokia's phones are about 80% recyclable, and the Finnish company has set up thousands of collection points where old chargers are collected to be recycled.


There are other examples of how mobile phone manufacturers are going green, but green mobile phones still have a pretty long way to go before they make it into the mainstream. The way I see it, the industry faces a few challenges:

#1 - People have a tendency to change phones between 18-24 months, even when their previous phones still have several years of functional life left. The draw of new features, new looks, and new fashion trends is often too hard for most people to resist. This trend has to be at least matched by green cellphones in order to break into the market.

#2 - Green technology is still in its infancy, and companies are at present slow to adopt it. Most of today's green phones trade off some functionality for the "green" label -- some have no cameras, no Internet access, or lack the convenience of chargers. Green phones need to match the functionality of their non-green counterparts, which can take at least a few more years.

#3 - It's also going to take a few more years for solar cell technology to be marketed at a truly commercial level. To offset the energy used to manufacture solar cells today, solar-powered cellphones need to be in use for five years -- which can be too long for the average consumer.

Still, what we're seeing today are baby steps in the right direction. Only when green cellphones become the norm rather than the exception will the technology really make a difference in the world.

I was more than happy to switch off my lights when 8.30 PM struck last Saturday, sending in one vote for Earth Hour. I learned about Earth Hour over the ads they showed on National Geographic and CNN over the past several weeks. Soon after, I started seeing Earth Hour shirts, Earth Hour mugs, Earth Hour keychains, and – get this – Earth Hour Twitter profiles.

I guess collaborative media was the real reason why Earth Hour's organizers were pretty confident they could get one billion “votes” for the worldwide event. Using only traditional media – TV and newspapers, for instance – would never have allowed Earth Hour to reach around the world quickly enough. But with the Earth Hour on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and a host of other collaborative media platforms, word got out pretty fast.

I suppose that's another advantage of collaborative media over traditional media – you can pretty much tune in to any piece of news you want and receive updates as they happen, which is impossible to do with a newspaper subscription. People all over the world were online when the lights started going off.

“Earth Hour” was mentioned on the Internet every seven seconds over the weekend, and Earth Hour collaborative media profiles and videos got viewed every twenty seconds. Obama Girl crossed my mind every ten minutes (she appeared in a new “Save Your Energy” video and I can't get her out of my head). It was insane – but of course, in a good-cause kind of way.

It's encouraging to see how collaborative media is being used to promote worthy causes like Earth Hour (and Obama Girl). Ordinary people have never had this ability to make their voice heard, and governments everywhere are slowly feeling the pressure to actually listen to their citizens. Obama's Administration, though having its fair share of whiny critics, has known about the power of collaborative media for a long time, and is currently using it to listen and reply to questions the American public want to ask.

I can imagine a lot of traditional politicians in Southeast Asia cringing every time they hear the word “Internet” -- which is, of course, a good thing. In this region, it'll be a refreshing change of scenery to see a government official who actually knows how to use the Internet to connect with the people – and not just his supporters, either.

I'm going to take a break from the usual tech/media scene and focus on one of my little-known interests – design. We all know that the slumping worldwide economy has put a clamp on industries everywhere, and one of the industries that got hit first was air travel. Many airlines had to merge with each other to survive, while others simply faded into nonexistence. Consequently, a lot of jumbo jets had to die, either sold for scrap metal or left mothballed in the desert.