Fairphone, the Dutch company that offers ethical and environmentally-friendly handsets, has announced its third smartphone.

The Fairphone 3 is now up for preorder for customers in Europe for €450 (about $500). The devices will be shipped by Sept. 3.

Ethical, Eco-Friendly Phone

Like its predecessor, the Fairphone 3 is build to last. Its design is modular so that instead of chucking the entire handset once it malfunctions, owners will be able to replace only the broken parts.

To further reduce its environmental impact, the company is offering cash refunds to consumers who will buy the new handset and recycle their old phones.

Fairphone has also made efforts to make sure that the materials used to construct the smartphone are sourced ethically. The company boasts that its phones use gold that has been certified Fairtrade while the tantalum and tin that are conflict-free. Copper and plastics are recycled.

Moreover, Fairphone founder and former CEO Bas van Abel said that claimed that more than 80 percent of the volume of Fairphone 3 is recycled. From his research, he added that a Fairphone 3 owner can reduce 30 percent of CO2 emission over the product's lifetime if the device is kept and maintained.

Also, the company is working on improving the health, safety, and pay of the factory workers who assemble the smartphones.

"We developed the Fairphone 3 to be a real sustainable alternative on the market, which is a big step towards lasting change," explained Eva Gouwens, the current CEO of Fairphone. "By establishing a market for ethical products, we want to motivate the entire industry to act more responsibly since we cannot achieve this change alone."

Fairphone 3 Specs

However, when it comes to features, Fairphone 3 would not be able to compete with the latest iPhone. The smartphone is equipped with a 5.7-inch Full HD display, a 12-megapixel rear camera, an 8-megapixel front camera, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor, a 3,000-mAh battery, 4 GB RAM, and 64 GB internal memory.

Currently, Fairphone represents less than 0.1 percent of smartphone shipments in Western Europe. However, van Abel said that the market for ethical devices is growing fast. He believes that the company can ship 200,000 handsets per year.

He also sees a shift toward sustainability and fair trade within the consumer electronics industry.

"More and more companies are looking into it, and it's also more demanding from the consumer perspective," he stated. "So it will happen. It's just that it's not happening fast enough."

Preorder of the Fairphone 3 is now available via the Fairphone website.