One thing about the average 18 month lifetime of cellphones. Nokia's have a reputation of being unusualy strong and durable phones, often surviving 4 years of constant abuse. It's nice to see some more improvements, but the best way to get a greener phone is still just to choose one that is strong enough tol last you at least a couple of years.

If any one knows of a comprehensive study into the effect on the environment that mobile phones have had over the last decade or so, I'd be very grateful if someone could point me towards it.

Here you go wee recycling, this should get you started:

[1] ISO 14031: Environmental Management. Environmental
Performance Evaluation - Guidelines.
Geneva, 1999
[2] Goedkoop, M. and Spriensma, R.: The Ecoindicator
99. A damage oriented method for Life
Cycle Impact Assessment. Ministry VROM. The
Hague, 1999 (see also www.pre.nl)
[3] Stutz, M.: Internal Life Cycle Studies of Various
Motorola Mobile Phones, Weisbaden, 1999 to
2003
[4] Nokia: Internal Life Cycle Studies of Various
Nokia Mobile Phones., Helsinki, 1997 to 2003
[5] Rice, G. and Jamieson, S.: Internal Life Cycle
Studies of Various Panasonic Mobile Phones.
Thatcham, June 2001 to Jan 2004
[6] Huisman, J.: The QWERTY/EE Concept. Quantifying
Recyclability and Eco-efficiency for
End-of-Life Treatments of Consumer Electronic
Products. Delft University of technology, Delft
2003
[7] Feldmann, K.; Meedt, O.; Trautner, S.; Scheller,
H. and Hoffman; W.: The "Green Design Advisor".
A tool for Design for Environment. Journal
of Electronics Manufacturing, Vol. 9, No 1,
2000, pp17-28

Wee,

No one really knows the entire impact over the course of the years, but they use life cycle assessment tools to equate chemals per phone, leaching, % recycled, etc and come up with rough data. LCA is pretty much the only way to estimate this because it take as much into account as possible. I know this is not exactly what you were looking for but it should get you on the right track.

Environmental impact is much more complex than looking at the product itself when you're talking about mobile phones.

The impact of mobiles goes beyond the actual devices, as they seem to produce tremendous efficiency gains, especially in developing countries. This efficiency gain often means less resources go to waste, which means less overall pollution than before. The pollution caused by making a phone may be wiped out by the pollution that the phone prevents.

Here's a concrete example:

The BBC did a series of articles about Tanzania several years ago, and one of them featured a taxi driver in Zanzibar who had bought a mobile phone. You can read the original article at this link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3141157.stm

In the old days he would just drive round town hoping to pick up passengers at random, which wasted a lot of petrol and caused excessive pollution. After he got a mobile phone he just had to advertise his number, wait for calls, and then drive straight to the customer who had phoned him, which meant he used the minimum amount of fuel.

In other words, owning a mobile phone reduced his car's pollution to its lowest possible level, so the net effect of the phone may have been to remove pollution rather than cause it.

The extra efficiency also meant he made a lot more money, more than doubling his income, so (assuming he bought a basic $40 or $50 model) the mobile phone must have paid for itself fairly quickly.

Obviously not everyone uses a phone in this way, but a lot of people do, especially in developing countries where landline networks often just don't exist. In these cases, you have to look at the effect of the phone on other sources of pollution before you decide if the phone itself causes overall pollution.