The Fair Phone
After I spend 3 months during my internship looking into what “Circular Economy” is and how it can be implemented in business and design, I fell in love with the product “the Fair Phone”. It is a perfect example of circular design - thinking about how to implement sustainable design in every step of the life of the product.
Starting with the sourcing of the materials: Our laptops, mobile phones, tablets, etc. contain rare earths, which are mainly mined in Congo, supporting Mafia and Civil War. Fair phones implemented “fair trade” mines, where the workers get paid reasonably and the safety standards are higher.
These rare earths are being turned into a phone, whose main feature is its modular design. You can open the phone, and see box-like components. It consists of the Display Module, the Camera Module, the Battery, the Core Module, the Top Module and the Bottom Module. If one of these modules breaks, you simply can order a new component to replace it instead of having to throw out the whole phone. The phone is designed to last, not to break. It can be dropped from 2 meters without a scratch. And in the unlikely case the screen breaks, it can be slit out and replaced with a new screen.
The same applied to upgrades. Every two years a new phone? No, but maybe just a new camera. So much material and process energy can be saved by this kind of modular design. Great design.
