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

Categories: Research
By: , IntoMobile
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 3:05 PM

Recycle your old cell phonesShame 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, Best Buy, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, Office Depot, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, Staples and T-Mobile 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]

About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...

  • Vinnie

    Americans, get off your butts, put aside the Bible and get some scientific sense into your head, and act accordingly. Too few of your country men know what they are doing and why.

  • Will Park

    Whoa there, wasn’t expecting that

  • Bruce W.

    Yeah, I work for Phones4Charity and these numbers are actually pretty shocking which is why we try to change that by doing cell phone drives for charities. We also resell them under P4C Global.