A Mobile Phone That Disintegrates and Sprouts Flowers, At Long Last

Old mobiles and other gadgets are currently seen as an environmental hazard, with landfills filling up with toxic tech that’s not doing the planet any favours. But if a group of British scientists have their way, new cellphones could simply be tossed on the ground when you’re done with them, as they’d just decompose and sprout pretty flowers after not too long.

This would happen thanks to a “special biodegradable polymer which is completely functional under normal working conditions, yet starts to rapidly decompose when placed in compost.” So once you toss the phone into compost, the case would disintegrate after a couple of weeks, and the sunflower seed inside would sprout up, bringing life where before there was none.

Only one problem: the fancy polymer would only be the case itself, all the guts of the phone would be there in the compost heap pollutin’ things up like before. So yeah, while it’s great that the plastic cases would be able to be composted, there’s still a ways to go before you can throw your phone out the window of a speeding car without feeling bad about it. [Warwick via Technabob]