To manufacture a smartphone, it is necessary to extract and refine between 70 and 150 kilos of raw materials, including around fifty different metals, via processes that consume a lot of water and chemicals. The manufacture of the terminal alone represents 70 to 80% of its ecological footprint – estimated at between 40 and 70 kilos of CO2 equivalent – at the end of an industrial process that is costly in resources and very polluting. Despite this heavy toll, which calls for extending the life of our phones as much as possible to reduce their ecological impact, some manufacturers still imagine being able to improve their image through pure greenwashinglike the Chinese OnePlus, which belongs to the multinational BBK Electronics (just like the brands Vivo, Oppo or Realme).
This is, in fact, the communication that OnePlus has chosen to carry out for its new recovery program. The brand does not say it is ready to buy back your old phone to allow you to acquire a brand new OnePlus 10T, OnePlus Nord 2T or OnePlus 10 Pro, but it uses this formula: “Swap a phone, plant a tree”. Which, you will understand, more or less amounts to saying in marketing language: buy a new phone, save the planet! Except no. Even if OnePlus joins forces with the Ecologi association to try to reduce the impact of its products on the planet and that each telephone exchange on OnePlus.com will result in the planting of a tree in a forest area, the equation which would consist of “to improve the world we live in” — in the words of the brand — is not good.
Help the planet by buying a phone, really?
Therefore, our hairs stand on end when we read “By giving OnePlus fans the chance to help the planet every time they buy a new phone, we’re helping them make a positive difference for the planet”. No, no and no. And it is not the validation of the approach by its partner, Ecologi, that will give meaning to this program. Ecologi’s partnership manager admits, of course, that it “there is still work to be done in the consumer electronics industry”but she finds “great to see OnePlus taking significant steps to reduce the environmental impact of its products through its take-back program”. The only benefit is that the smartphones thus collected are intended to be recycled in due form, and will perhaps avoid sleeping at the bottom of a drawer or ending up in a landfill.
If OnePlus already displays 550 trees planted thanks to this operation on its site, the live monitoring of the operation on the Ecologi platform for its part reports 0 planting at the present time. © OnePlus
Obviously, we would have preferred OnePlus to campaign for extending the life of its phones, improve its repair programs, implement advanced eco-design processes or simply insist on the need to recycle phones that have become unusable. . And if the brand also wants to plant trees, that would be great. What’s a shame is that Oppo (on which OnePlus depends) has engaged in some of these necessary ecological changes – and obviously made sure to let people know about it. However, conveying such aberrant messages makes it lose all credibility in our eyes.
In this context, we will take the opportunity to recall the recommendations of the Ademe (Ecological Transition Agency) concerning the use of the smartphone: choose well (by consulting the repairability index, for example), consider renting or second-hand purchase, take care of it, repair it to make it last longer and give it a second life. As for us, we like — to simplify — to repeat this maxim: “The greenest smartphone is the one that is already in your hands.”