O2 Eco rating helps consumers choose a sustainable future

Do you know how sustainable your mobile phone is? Not in general terms, but in comparison with the other handsets out there? Yesterday I’d be confident in putting money on the fact that you didn’t, but that is all set to change with the launch today of the new O2 Eco rating, which we’re proud to have helped develop.

Forum for the Future has been working in partnership with O2 for a while now to help them in their goal of being a leading sustainable business. The Eco rating, which can now be seen on O2 handsets online (and in-store from Friday), is one small part of that work.

O2’s Eco rating is a total sustainability assessment scheme which we’ve created together, in close collaboration with handset manufacturers, and it gives UK consumers the information they need to make an informed choice about the devices they use.

I’m not naïve enough to think that the sustainability of a handset is suddenly going to become the deciding factor when people are choosing a phone. But we do know that it is a significant issue for many, and a key concern for a growing few.

What’s more, it is information that UK customers have been asking for – and now they have it, for the very first time.

Sustainability involves an endless range of considerations – from carbon, to water, to biodiversity, to fair trade, to corporate policies, and so on. In the face of this conflicting complexity, it’s remarkably difficult to keep things easy, so we’ve spent much of the last year doing just that.

The result is that Eco rating is a sophisticated but simple assessment, which takes the full range of mobile phone sustainability impacts into account. And it does so in a way that allows all to be fairly assessed, and which communicates the results to customers in a clear and understandable way. In doing so, it also tackles one of the more fundamental challenges to a better world.

Sustainability can be paralysingly difficult to understand – and it doesn’t help that the messages are too often those of doom and gloom. Listen to the popular media, and it sounds as if the only alternatives open to us in the future are to be wiped out by packs of ravenous polar bears carried in on the tsunamis that wash across our burned and battle-scarred lands, or to revert to lives of shivering in caves huddled around earwax candles.

Now, I don’t know about you, but neither of these options are particularly appealing to me. And I don’t imagine they are of much interest to anyone else either, save perhaps big-game-hunting hermits (a woefully under-represented demographic group). Faced with these options, it’s little surprise if people either feel so daunted by the challenge that they need to retreat to bed and pull the covers over their head, or get on with consuming at an even greater rate.

After all, if the future is rubbish either way, the best thing to do is clearly to have as much fun now while you still can. The result of the apocalyptic message is that rational, intelligent and caring people do the opposite of what’s needed.

However, these nightmare future scenarios are only a tiny subset of the potential story – what is missing are the visions of how much better life could be in a sustainable future. And it will be. All the results of what is proposed in the name of ‘sustainability’ are also desirable in their own right: safer, more connected, communities; reduced fuel bills and dependence on expensive energy; a more diverse landscape producing more nutritious food; improved health for ourselves and our children; greater social justice and equality around the world; a better work–life balance...shall I go on?

This is the world I want, and because the future isn’t decided, it’s also the one we can have if we set our minds to it. Showing people how their future will be better and giving them clear steps to getting there offers something positive to work towards, and an incentive to do so.

Eco rating removes the incapacitating indecision of too much complexity and shows how desirable, cutting-edge technology has a place in a sustainable world. It gives the clear and positive message of a sustainable future that is needed to motivate people and which will, hopefully, prevent me having to brush up on my bear wrestling.

For more information, please visit the Eco ratings project page.