Phone-y flowers.
With 80 million new wireless phones sold in North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. each year
and the average user upgrading to a new phone every 18 months, the
disposal of old phones is a huge problem. The phones not only take up
valuable landfill space, but also contain toxic metals toxic metal Environment Any metal known to be toxic to humans–eg, antimony, arsenic, beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, lead, mercury, nickel. Cf Nontoxic metal. such as lead and
cadmium cadmium (kăd`mēəm) [from cadmia, Lat. for calamine, with which cadmium is found associated], metallic chemical element; symbol Cd; at. no. 48; at. wt. 112.41; m.p. 321°C;; b.p. 765°C;; sp. gr. 8. that can leach into the environment. Researchers at
Britain's University of Warwick In the 1960s and 1970s, Warwick had a reputation as a politically radical institution.[3] More recently, the University has been seen as a favoured institution of the British New Labour government. working with Motorola and the
materials company PVAXX Research and Development have come up with a way
to stem at least part of the problem in a unique way. They have
developed a special polymer phone casing with a high-quality finish--and
a twist: it's compostable. For a final flourish, the designers
embedded flower seeds in the casing, which germinate when the cover is
composted.
COPYRIGHT 2005 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 2005, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.
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