Americans are un-green – less than 10% recycle old mobile phones

Shame on the lot of you. Well, not really, but it’s kind of sad to hear that less than 10% of Americans are green-savvy. Which is to say, greater than 90% of us do NOT recycle our used/old cellphones.

iSuppli Corp’s consumerTrak service indicates that only 9.4% of new mobile phone buyers last quarter dropped off their used handsets to be recycled. On the bright side, this number reflects a doubling of recycled handsets compared to Q3 2007, but is still nowhere near the “green” zone.

“Simply throwing away a mobile handset is not an environmentally responsible action. Mobile handsets include hazardous materials, including mercury and lead. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates Americans discard 125 million phones each year, creating 65,000 tons of waste. All this toxic waste can pollute air and groundwater,” says Greg Sheppard, chief development officer for iSuppli.

If you’ve got a couple handsets lying around, collecting dust, either get them up on eBay or recycle them. The longer you keep them, the better the chance that they’ll end up in a landfill.

AT&T (NYSE: T), Best Buy, LG Electronics, Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Office Depot, Samsung, Sony Ericsson (NYSE: SNE), Sprint, Staples and T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) all collect cellphones for recycling.

Here’s a list of cellphone drop-off centers – EPA mobile phone recycling centers

Go forth and be green! Or at least try harder…

[Via: Mobile Crunch]