This is an English translation of the article Fairphone: Zu viel versprochen. Eine Bilanz by Sebastian Jekutsch. (Please note that this article is outdated.)
For over three years, I have been concerning myself with fair electronics and especially IT. I first noticed the Fairphone project near the end of 2010: A feel-good video directly from the Southern D.R. Congo’s mining areas, where the team bought a few bits of (purported) cobalt ore directly from the workers, and advertised this as the first step towards a fair mobile phone. It seemed pretty naïve. I noticed that there was not a single technician on the team, so that the whole thing seemed to be more of a marketing experiment than a serious hardware development project. And besides, how should one go about producing a fair phone if even a computer mouse can only be made partially fair?
But it was built! The phones have actually been manufactured, and we can take stock: How fair is the Fairphone?
I will be concentrating on three aspects that are especially important and concern the fairness of the product: the sourcing of raw materials, the working conditions in manufacturing, and transparency in general. I test these according to Fairphone’s two promises: that the Fairphone is “ethically sourced,” and that it “inspires the industry.”
Weiterlesen →
dfunding teilweise vorfinanziertes Phablet, das bis Weihnachten erhältlich sein soll. Ein Smartphone namens Shift5 soll folgen. Das Besondere daran: Sie sollen „fair hergestellt“ werden. Was hier im Detail versprochen wird ist viel. Ich nutze die Gelegenheit, es mit den real existierenden Bedingungen in Chinas IT-Fabrikation zu vergleichen und gebe eine Einschätzung. Am Ende steht eine Anregung für das Projekt, die allerdings unabhängige Kontrollen voraussetzt.