With the rapid advancement in mobile technology, models don’t remain new for long and better models keep coming frequently. People of course, are tempted to dig their hands into the latest mobile phones and most of them do. But what do you think happens to the handsets that precede them? Some people (maybe only people like my mother!) put them away to show their grand children the cell phones their grandparents used in their youth! Others don’t care what happens to them and their discarded devices become a part of last month’s waste. This practice of throwing phones away doesn’t help with the whole electronic waste predicament. Mobile phone recycling is an effective way to prevent that.

Why Should You Recycle Your Old Phone?

Cell phone waste is considered a threat to the environment, so I’ll tell you a few ways of recycling your cell phone, if you don’t want to be included in the 7% of the cell phone-toting population, who do throw them away. Mobile phones are composed of various materials put together like metals and plastic, and some are valuable enough that can be recovered and reused, like silver. Phone waste also contains harmful toxins like mercury and lead. So, it is quite essential to recycle your handset and prevent it from becoming an addition to the millions of tons of electronic waste – after all every single one counts. So, now the question remains what should you do to recycle your phone? There are quite a few possibilities and some of them are listed here.

Re-using components

Most of us don’t really care about the components of the mobile phone and only want it to work for us non-stop. But, if you take some time out to understand their usage, you’ll know just how much you are squandering! There are a lot of things in an average cell phone that can be reused. You can definitely reuse the batteries, if you don’t know about the other cool stuff inside your phone. You can reuse LCD displays, speakers, SD cards/ flash memory, keyboards and a host of other things. So, if you’ve upgraded your previous phone, then you should tear apart the old one and make use of all, it has to offer. “After all, you paid for it!”

Mobile Phone Recycling

If you are not sure how to reuse the components yourself, or to pull them apart for that matter, you can also recycle them by putting them into the drop boxes provided by non-profit cell phone recycling organizations in US and Canada. Obviously, they don’t have these drop boxes at every nook and cranny but there’s always one near you that you can locate by looking up their website on the internet.

Recycling for Charity

If you are going to throw it away, anyways, then why couldn’t you throw it for the “greater good”. There are welfare organizations out there that are focused on getting discarded mobiles from you, restoring them to their optimal use and then selling them over to the developing countries. This affords people in those areas an inexpensive means to communicate and you could be one of the people who made that possible for them.