Correct me if I'm wrong here but are Nokia seriously hoping that consumers will simply drop their old mobiles into a recycling bin when they buy a new one?

Me, I whack 'em straight on eBay - I mean I paid good money for it and most mobiles are worth significant amounts of cash second hand. Ok fair enough if it's 15 years old and worth about 20p, but how many mobiles fit that category?

In addition when a mobile is sold second hand and then used, isn't that more environmentally friendly than "recycling" it, in whichever form?

Sick as a bird 'cos I would be if I threw away a perfectly good mobile!

Gotta concur with Daniel, if Nokia would like to buy my retiring mobile then fine. Since, however, this is all being graded by the same people that inspired petrol stations to be burnt when an oil platform was to be sunk and who then turned round after multi-millions were spent to beach it and break it up on-shore saying 'oops you were right all along, it would have been less hazardous to sink it', how accurate are their figures this time?

I thought that there was a consensus from earlier comments threads that they'd completely lost the plot some years ago.

WTF does anyone care about a bunch for eco-terrorists?

Why the hell would El Reg give a great shiite? Slow news day?

Why not something about why my Vista Business SP1 install went fucking crazy with unending reboots? And why it "took" only after getting a Windows Defender update? Huh? Huh?

Yeah, I'm tweaked today.

(Evil Bill because today he's a bastard in my opinion)

...rating the greenness of large corporations.

We just all need to remember (as mentioned above) that it's run by a bunch of people who try to stop oil tankers with zodiacs.

Just Greenpeace leftists trying to expand their political mass movement into new territory.

Let's remember, these are the sort of people who signed petitions to ban water -- remember Penn and Teller's prank with "hydrogen monoxide".

The wonderful thing about being an advocate for some cause or other is that you can appoint yourself qualified to make pronouncements about anything, anywhere and your followers will accept what you say.

This is not limited to GP, or any other "cause". Apple do it themselves - just look at the uncritical acceptance that their followers bestow on pretty much anything they bring out! I'm expecting an Apple-logo'd cardboard box to get rave reviews from the style-over-substance brigade any day now.

Right, back to the rant.Here we have an organisation who, if not explicitly anti-technology, certainly give the impression that we'd all be better off without a lot of the stuff we take for granted. They have somehow decided that we all need to know their opinions on how other people run their businesses. Maybe it's time for a few of the "targets" to start taking a closer look at how GP run themselves.

Maybe BP could see how they stack up as a petrochemical supplier, HBOS could see how well they manage as a bank and Nokia could research their standing as a mobile phone producer. What's that you say? "But GP aren't any of those things, they're a P.R. company!".

And there lies the answer: Nokia, or any of the other companies GP took it upon themselves to investigate, aren't an ecology company either. They make stuff for profit. Yes, it's nice not to waste materials and energy (because that lowers profits and hacks a few people off) but to have a bunch of outsiders criticise you for not meeting their standards in a field where you aren't a player must be rather galling. Maybe GP should be offering some constructive advice and help - rather than just sitting on the sidelines sniping at the easy targets.

Lenovo doesn't get pushed back as it's Chinese factories will be running on electricity produced by some very nasty coal power stations?

Missed that one didn't you Greenpeace.

Of course they're not going to attack anything to do with their comrades in the red East! Capitalist pollution is of course far worse than communist pollution.

Assuming that you don't like Greenpeace who should be asked about this sort of thing. I agree with recycling by using them for phones it's a lot better to reuse them than to trash them in some way. Personally I think environmental concerns are a critical mass thing when you can't live with the toxic mess any more then and only then will it be addressed effectively not before. This is like plane safety until a bunch of important people (politicians, corporate execs, sports stars) die horribly it won't get anything but hand waving.

People get the basic "free" phone, two years latter the battery is going and a new one costs 80% of the price of a new phone. A 2 year old cheap phone with a dead battery has very little value, and there are a lot of people that have one or two sitting in a drawer, they are better off going in the Nokia bin then sitting in the drawer for another 5 years, or getting tossed in the trash.

So, according to you, we should listen to Samsung's opinion on Nokia, Exxon's on BP and Microsoft's on Nintendo?