Just when I thought the climate change penny was finally dropping for the marketing industry, the marketing gurus have excelled themselves once more.
After Tesco's bizarre and now infamous 'Flights for lights' advert, which encouraged us to buy low-energy lightbulbs with the lure of free air miles, it's now the turn of the mobile phone recycling industry to be hitched to the free flights bandwagon.
Yup. Recycle your old mobile phone and get up to 750 air miles in exchange. Of course, handing in your handset for recycling or reuse is clearly a good thing. But can we expect every piece of good environmental behaviour to be rewarded with the promise of more air miles? It's like rewarding an alcoholic for staying off the sauce by giving them a bucket of gin.
Apart from the 'beyond ironic' section of the Air Miles website's 'With the world in mind' green pages, there seems to be a rash of increasingly odd ways to obtain that precious right to fly for free. There's the honeymooning couple who took somewhat extreme advantage of another ill-advised Tesco trial of giving air miles for recycling cans and bottles by collecting 60,000 items (often by apprehending other people's leftover recycling) to cover their business class flight home. Or how about 'LiamRugby' who bought £170 worth of shampoo to get enough air miles for a Club upgrade. "Clearly my friends all think I'm crazy," commented Liam. At least in perennially sensible Canada you can actually exchange air miles for environmental rewards, from a donation to WWF through to a folding solar panel or electric scooter.
Maybe we should resist the tawdry temptation of some Transatlantic travelling courtesy of air miles? Here are some alternative suggestions as to what we might do with our old mobile handsets:
1. Get creative: Donate your phone to Rob Pettit, who creates his art work with recycled phones, or Joe McKay who makes high-tech sculptural pieces with old and damaged mobiles
2. Hold on to it. Keep it and share your retention joy with others at Kept
3. Donate your phone to charity via Greensource or the Woodland Trust who'll turn your phone into forest
4. Give it to someone who'll make use of it - see Lifeline for Africa
If none of these appeal you could always enter this weekend's World Phone Throwing championships in Finland. But you'd probably have to fly to get there in time. Now where can I get some air miles again?
