The phone that sows seeds for a better future
These days, the 'wonders' of built-in obsolescence mean we're all used to throwing away mobile phones about as regularly as we discard cardboard coffee cups. There are alternatives of course: creating a fascinating cellphone museum in your home or cashing in from recycling programmes like Mopay and fonebak. But there are still an awful lot of the things ending up in landfill.
But a group of scientists right here in Blighty have come up with another solution: biodegradable phones that sprout sunflowers. The phone casing would be composed of a "special biodegradable polymer which is completely functional under normal working conditions, yet starts to rapidly decompose when placed in compost." Sound hippy enough yet? Well, maybe not quite, as we're yet to invent fully biodegradable batteries, circuit boards and other mobile phone innards, so these would be left to pollute the earth. Still, there's be some nice flowers growing nearby... [via Gizmodo]
