Americans won’t be caught dead with anything less than the latest fashion in cell phones. Avidly chasing these fickle and finicky consumers, manufacturers offer almost 500 different models to choose from, with over a dozen new variants coming out every month. The result is that we throw away something like 125 million working phones annually because they look sooo last year.
          They are small, but when we toss them, their cumulative quantity adds greatly to “e-waste”, the fastest growing category of the municipal waste stream that consists of televisions, computers, phones and other electronics. We throw away more than three million tons of this gear every year in the U.S. alone.
          It doesn’t have to be. Phones are different. Almost all still work when we banish them in favor of the latest slick clamshell or slide opener, or are forced to use a different one when we switch carriers. If we dispose of them sensibly, rather than consign them to the landfill, they could have three or four more useful lives, because there is a huge international trade in phones that Americans are unaware of.
          In the U.S., phones are often free or heavily discounted by phone companies more focused on selling you their usage contracts, with the effect that their true value is disguised. Returned to the supply chain, however, the newer ones are valuable enough to refurbish and use with consumers as replacements of their broken phones covered by warranty, or those lost or stolen but covered by insurance. And they are certainly of value to overseas markets where they are not free or discounted, and can be prohibitively costly for cultures with far less money to spend. There never was a widespread landline infrastructure in Africa, for example; therefore 75% of the phones in the poorer countries are cells, for which their populaces depend on castoffs from wealthier nations. So it's likely that, had you returned it to the aftermarket, they’d still be fixing and reselling your very first cell phone somewhere out there like Ukraine or Nigeria or Burkina Faso.The Drawer           But maybe you didn’t just throw away those old cell phones. They may be in what the industry refers to as “the drawer” – the drawer in our house where we stick such things rather than throw them away. There’s an outfit that will do the right thing with the contents of your drawer, Collective Good (http://collectivegood.com/) in Boulder, CO, and its sister operation, Green Phone. Collective Good contributes a portion of its proceeds to whichever of 500 charities you select from which you will receive a donation acknowledgement for tax use. Green Phone (http://greenphone.com/) buys your phone. The Staples chain is also a drop-off point for recycling.
          Even a broken phone has value: about a dollar’s worth of gold and other precious metals that will result in your phone being routed to countries where it is economically worth it to extract the minerals.
          Either way, when you extend a cell’s useful life, you are keeping some 200 chemical compounds out of the landfill, most of indeterminate effect, but some definitely hazardous. An EPA study of 34 models of cell phones found that all leached lead an average of 17 times the acceptable federal threshold. And those three or four extra lives you can give your phone mean one less cell phone that does not need to be manufactured, does not need to draw resources from the earth, does not need to consume the energy it takes to produce it, does not generate the 220 pounds of waste that is produced from mining the gold that goes into it.
          And yet, the industry estimates that a mere 1% of cell phones are recycled. That largely owes to how few people even know that the phones should be recycled. That probably includes your friends and they might appreciate your telling them of the problem and the opportunity by sending them a link to this page – www.planetwatch.org/whatwecando.htm.
          Time to ransack those drawers.         - Stephen Wilson