What will happen to older cellphones if they are no longer useful to their owners? Mobile phone owners have many good choices, and none of those include throwing the old mobile telephone away in the trash or leaving it in a drawer.
In line with the United States EPA, Americans recycled approximately 14 million used mobile phones in 2007. When recycled, cellphones can be taken apart for the parts, thus they can then be utilized in other phones or any other technology, they are donated to charities to help individuals who have true need of cellphones but do not want them, or they can be donated to our military. Any one of these choices provide improvement over allowing a well used mobile telephone to collect dust in a very old drawer with all of your other unused mobile phones, and these are better choices than throwing that old mobile telephone away, thus possibly toxic chemicals may be added to the landfills.
Cellphone batteries contain lead and mercury that can be detrimental to humans and animals when placed in landfills or burned. Most mobile phones have sufficient lead in them to be considered dangerous waste using the federal guidelines. Even phones happen to be lead free are believed to become hazardous waste in California because of high amounts of copper, nickel, antimony, and zinc that end up thrown away into landfills and eventually leech out to pollute water and soil. The EPA estimates that recycling 1 million mobile phones offers adequate power to power 185 houses with electricity for a year.
Cellphones for Soldiers is one other method to recycle phones. This really is a charity this led to were only available in 2004 by a 13 year old girl and her 12 year old brother. This charity collects mobile phones, sells them to be recycled, then takes that money out of the phone recycling and buys prepaid telephone cards for American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The charity estimates they're going to receive 750,000 mobile phones to be recycled in 2011. So far the charity has collected over 7.5 million cellphones which has turned into 90 million prepaid calling card minutes for American soldiers.
More companies are also buying used mobile phones from people. Some even spend the money for postage to offer the customer mail the used mobile telephone directly to them, even if the telephone doesn't work. Frequently, for the business buying an utilized mobile telephone, the metals in the telephone make buying a broker phone really worth the expense. So although selling an used telephone just isn't as altruistic to be a donation, this still keeps phones from landfills which still help the environment.
Old mobile phones are adding tons of toxic metals and chemicals to our landfills, polluting the air and water. Whether donating or selling an old mobile telephone, the user is creating our environment safer for everybody and then for anything by not adding to landfills.
Author Resource:-
Jane Grahame is the webmistress of http://www.whatsmyphoneworth.com/ - a price comparison service for people wanting to sell mobile phone to leading mobile phone recyclers in the UK. She also uses her mobile phone far too much!justhost coupon
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