Many people have old mobiles hanging around at home in drawers and they could be totally obsolete or damaged.
The second annual National Cell Phone Recycling Week has commenced and the US Environmental Protection Agency is encouraging consumers to have a good look round and clear out their old handsets by recycling or donating their old mobiles.
The Agency are concerned that the United States now hoards enormous amounts of electronic gadgetary and, in particular, mobile phones, which are easy to put away somewhere and forget.
Many people know about recycling but often do not know how to go about it. Sometimes it is just much easier to throw the handset in a drawer where it doesn’t take up much space, rather than make the effort to find out how to recycle. Eventually, people find them again and conclude that their phone is way too old and now worthless, so they just bin it. The trouble is that when phones are not disposed of properly metals used in their manufacture such as lead and cadmium can leach into groundwater and pollute drinking water supplies.
The EPA say that only about 10% of mobile phones are recycled and they estimate that 75 pounds of gold, 772 pounds of silver and 35,274 pounds of copper could be recovered for every 1 million handsets recycled.