Green Corn Cell phones..

It’s green all the way! Yes Samsung has finally introduced two mobile phones, Samsung W510 and F268, made out of plastic from corn at the World IT show in Seoul on June 16, 2008. Samsung’s W510 is going to be the first ever eco friendly collection among the mobiles. The Samsung F268 includes an alarm on the battery charger to alert users when the battery is fully-charged thereby saving electricity. The concern has been working on the corn based plastics since 2004 in Korea and 2005 in china. These mobiles are made out of bio-plastic obtained from corn excluding the usage of heavy metals- cadmium, lead, mercury in handset.

This idea of using plastics made from corn is in the air since 1990. Few Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu have worked on bio-plastics in their products like Laptop PC’s and mobile phones. But many companies avoided using bio plastics since they were weak and can’t be used in heavy products. But the sudden rise in crude oil prices evoked the researchers to go for corn based plastics mixed with petroleum based plastics to create a stronger material suitable for mobiles.

Bio plastic is created from the starch and sugars of corn and potatoes, which is then fermented with lactic-acid bacilli.

These recent evolutions in mobiles seem to exclude the usage of PVC’s (polyvinyl chloride) and BFR’s (brominated flame retardant) completely in the coming years therby permitting to breathe a sigh of relief in the global market...