Fairphone, an initiative that plans on making a smartphone without harming the planet and its inhabitants, is now taking pre-orders, so it can start the manufacturing process.

5,000 pre-orders are needed for the company to start manufacturing the smartphone, which looks good in terms of specifications. It has a 4.3-inch qHD display (960 x 540 pixels resolution), a MTK6589M quad-core CPU at 1.2GHz, paired with 1GB of RAM, as well as 16GB of internal memory, expandable via the microSD slot. The main camera is an 8-megapixel one, while the front one is 1.3-megapixels. Fairphone is a dual SIM smartphone, which runs Android 4.2.

Pre-orders have already started in Europe, so you can go ahead and buy one, at a price of €325.00 (around $420), including VAT. The smartphone comes without headphones or a charger, the latter which you can get for an additional €7.50.

Why is it special?

While those specs might look alright, they probably won’t be the reason why you’d want to buy the Fairphone. You can actually help to make a difference by getting a smartphone that’s built according to a set of fair principles.

These include suppliers that have good working conditions (remember the Foxconn problems) and recycling practices that are safe for the environment, as well as not including minerals in the device that fund conflicts. That means that the metals used in your device won’t help illegal armies get financed.

Also, money from the smartphone goes into recycling initiatives, the purpose being to make phones entirely from recycled materials. Deals with manufacturers, as well as the costs involved, are as transparent as possible.

The video below will tell you more about what Fairphone tries to accomplish.

At the time this article was written, the Fairphone had sold 2,369 phones, with 20 days left on the campaign. According to the Fairphone website, if 5,000 Fairphones are pre-ordered until June 14, the first ones will start getting delivered this fall.

What do you think about this project? Do you plan on buying a Fairphone?