This week, many of the intertubes are abuzz with news coming out of Las Vegas, where the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is taking place. One doesn’t immediately associate “consumer electronics” with sustainability, and Treehugger, among others, have found CES to be a mixed bag when it comes to addressing environmental topics. Reports coming out of Vegas indicate that there is somewhat of a presence of energy efficiency, renewable energy, improved battery life, and the environmental impacts of things like tablets and cloud computing. Still, “green” is not a hot issue at CES this year, probably not surprisingly. (Treehugger has a roundup here.) Via Triple Pundit, one nugget (not a golden nugget, but a nugget anyway) of news comes from Sprint, which is sprinting ahead with an emphasis on sustainable phone design. That may seem like an oxymoron, but Sprint already has an environmental scorecard that guides device designers in sustainable directions, and new criteria mandate that all phones be certified via UL Environment, “which includes specifications for improving reparability and creating more sustainable packaging.” Last year, Sprint and Underwriters Laboratories partnered to develop the UL-ISR 100 standard, the wireless industry’s first environmental standard for mobile devices. The first device to get the certification was Samsung’s Replenish, an Android smartphone, which runs on Sprint’s platform. Sprint is hoping that by being at the forefront of sustainability in the wireless industry they will get other carriers and manufacturers on board. Here’s hoping.