Look around your house, and you may find that like most Americans, you have a bunch of old cell phones just lying around not being used. In fact, over 150 million cell phones are taken out of service each year in America alone. That is over 400,000 cell phones per day! The image above is just a sampling of those 150 million phones. (For more photos of how much waste Americans produce, checks out these shocking photographs by Chris Jordan).
The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has launched a new effort called “Recycle Your Cellphone: It’s an easy call!” to get people to start recycling old cell phones.
Aside from just being more garbage that has to go somewhere (landfills are filling up!), the batteries for these phones are pretty detrimental to the environment.
So thankfully, there are a number of ways you can recycle an old cell phone with very little effort. Different cell phone providers (Verizon, T-Mobile…) have different recycling policies, but Sprint will take any phone from anywhere.
In order to publicize the scale of this issue, and artist named Chris Jordan had photographed the awesome amounts of waste that Americans produce each year. Chris want’s people to realize how much waste we produce, and think more about Reusing, Reducing, and Recycling. Check out this great interview with Chris and Steven Colbert on the Colbert Report.
Recently, the NY Times featured this issue in the Sunday Magazine, and really delved into the issue of cell phone waste a recycling.
You can arrange a cell phone recylcing drive in your school, and send the phones to a number of places that will refurbish the phones, or recylce them. Some will also donate some money to the charity of your choice for each phone donated. For one example of this kind of organization, check out Collective Good.
The best I have found is http://www.cellularchallenge.net . They clear your personal data (pictures, numbers, text messages) and you can print postage directly from their site and just drop it in the mail It’s easy and they accept our older phones as well and give them to a good cause and keep the material out of the landfill.