In today's fierce and competitive market, how can a company sell more cell phones? One response: manufacture "green" phones. Samsung, the global Korean consumer electronics corporation, announced during the Seoul World IT Show, their plans to offer two environmentally friendly handsets. The first is the W510. The W510 is constructed from a corn-based bioplastic and is free from hazardous heavy metals such as lead, the heavy metals mercury, currently a concern in the consumption of any fish products, and cadmium, a potentially toxic element that internal combustion engines spew.

This is the first bioplastic-based phone from Samsung. On the other hand Samsung is neither the first nor the only big-time consumer electronics manufacturer that is utilizing the unconventional material - at the CES in January, Fujitsu demonstrated a notebook computer with a case made of bioplastic. Furthermore Nokia has produced the 3310 Evolve,, a cell phone partially constructed from biomaterials.

Getting rid of petroleum-based plastics is an excellent proposition, but by now it is well known that corn as a substitute for fuel and plastics is not a sustainable, We hope that Samsung's newer models will use a more sustainable, next generation state of art bioplastic even though we understand, the behind-the-scenes decisions about trying out new bioplastic materials made of corn that is inexpensive and easily obtainable before any real decisions are made.

Samsung has come out with a new phone. It is called the F268 and the company confirms that this phone does not contain either PVC Polyvinyl chloride, a multi-use petroleum based plastic or Brominated Flame Retardant, a flame retardant containing bromine (Flame retardants consisting of organic compounds containing bromine). That telephone is an good move in the firm's scheduled phasing out of polyvinyl chloride and brominated flame retardants in all its portable phones no later than the year 2010.

Samsung has received accolades from Greenpeace for it's environmentally-friendly electronics. This is based on the recent "Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics", which says that the company has received a rankng of 7 out of 10 since March. ranking it near the top. Regularly, it also garnered leading points for its PVC and BFR phase-out timeline. On the other hand while, in November, Samsung debuted the company's PVC-free LCD panels, it only lost points on the strict Greenpeace ranking system when it faild to install a complete take-back and recycling program.

Maria is a freelance journalist with an interest in recycling and schemes where you can    .