A bloke has come up with a cardboard mobile phone with solar cells which he hopes will wean people off green house gas causing models. The Label With Green is a design by Shao Wei Huang, Chia-Yi Cho, Yu Pei Kuo & Chung Kai Chiang. To power the phone you need to use ECO-Green Electronic Labels, which are solar paper labels that juice up the phones various components (display, speaker, keypad, camera, and solar battery) independently.

To turn on any function you need to stick on enough solar labels onto the rear cover to power it. The idea does not appear to want to produce a gadget which is of any use but rather to make you aware of the amount of toxic waste being accumulated due to improper disposal of electronic gadgets, our greed for upgrades and the amount of energy we consume to power our stuff.

It is a concept gadget which is intended to lead towards getting people to think about better products rather than actually bringing that exact product to market. However it has a more than a few problems. It's utterly impractical to try and charge a phone's components separately, let alone with solar power. No one, however as much they might want to save polar bears and those cute snow foxes is going to have a good time moving stickers around on a phone in order to get it to work.

Ironically it will be played with for a few times and then put aside when people want to make a call. It will then be added to the e-waste pile and the value of a person's change of consciousness on the waste issue be negated.

You can find some nice snaps here.