Nokia Goes Green With Phone Chargers

Nokia has come up with a plan to help out the environment by saving some energy when your not charging your mobile phone.
According to Kirsi Sormunen, Vice-President of Environmental Affairs at Nokia, “Around two-thirds of the energy used by a mobile phone is lost when it is unplugged after charging but the charger itself is left in a live socket. We want to reduce this waste and are working on reducing to an absolute minimum the amount of energy our chargers use. The new alerts also play an important role, encouraging people to help us in this goal by unplugging their chargers.”

This seems like a good idea, and most people have no idea that electricity is still being used by chargers that are plugged into a socket but not plugged into any device. I would imagine that electricity might be wasted by having my mobile phone plugged into the charger after it’s fully charged, but after I unplug my phone I thought the electricity would stop. Nokia calls this electricity that’s being used a charger’s “no-load energy consumption”.

According to the release, Nokia is coming out with a few new models (1200, 1208 and 1650) with more to come in the future which will alert you that the phone is fully charged and prompt you to unplug the charger from the wall. Is this going to result in people crawling under their desk each day to plug and unplug their charger from the outlet so they don’t waste electricity when nothing is charging? Finding way to disable the alert seems more likely to me.

You can find more explanation on no-load energy consumption and some recent figures on Nokia’s Product efficiency report.