By now, public awareness about mobile phone recycling has surely increased to more than the 26% shown in the Nokia study. However, many people may not realize that another benefit to recycling is the amount of raw materials that are produced by the donated phones.
Of course, recycling has become a lot easier and of course, it’s important. According to the much touted Nokia study recently published, a mere 3% of mobile users donate or recycle their old phones. The Finnish mobile phone company surveyed 6,500 people and made the distressing discovery that most people don’t even know that recycling their old phones is possible. So what happens to them? They end up in a drawer or worse - a landfill. There were 4% of users who donated their old handsets to family or friends or resold them. Underdeveloped countries and emerging markets and are excellent sources for old phones. You can even get paid. Getting paid while keeping phones out of landfill seems like a pretty good idea.
In the larger scheme of things, it may seem like one phone would not make much of a difference. However, Nokia estimates that if each one of the 3 billion mobile phone owners recycled one, the result would be the collection of 240,000 tonnes of raw materials that could be reused and remanufactured into other products, thereby preserving other resources. In addition, the carbon emissions eliminated by reuse of those raw materials would be “the equivalent of taking 4 million cars off the road,” Nokia said.
“It’s an opportunity for us to work with people to raise that number,” said Nokia spokeswoman Susan Allsopp said.
For more information, visit. Nokia.com
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