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Keep that old cell phone out of the landfill by donating it to a responsible recycler.

Monday Oct 06, 2008.     By Sharon Hoyer

Lifestyle Feed

I bought my first cell phone about 10 years ago. Back then, I referred to it as a "car phone" since its sole purpose was to reside in my glove compartment in case of flats or a failed alternator or any number of minor emergencies my aging Buick was prone to. This was a good home for the phone since the gadget was roughly the dimensions of a Doc Martens shoe and weighed about three times as much. Between then and now I've gone through what I always thought was an embarrassing number of phones—seven, if memory serves—due to loss or plan-renewal upgrades or general clumsiness. I've changed cell phones more often than I've changed apartments but, as it turns out, I'm right on par with the national average. Americans tend to replace their cell phones every 18 months. That adds up to a lot of discarded technology, much of which—let's be honest here—is still functional.

The trash generated by the personal electronics industry—snappily referred to as e-waste (though I think a sub-category of iWaste should enter the tech-slang lexicon, considering the semi-annual release of MacBooks, iPhones and iPods with double the capacity and speed of their predecessors at half the cost)—has become a very real environmental and human rights concern for several reasons. First is the quantity and toxicity of the trash itself. Though they may shrink as they evolve, cell phones carry a hefty footprint for their negligible bulk.

In 2002, an organization called INFORM published a report on the impact of cell-phone waste. At the time, Americans were pitching about 100 million phones weighing in at 50,000 tons—yes, tons—per annum. Less than one percent of these were recycled. Cell phones contain toxins like beryllium, lead and coltran in the circuit boards and mercury in the LCD screens. In a test conducted by the EPA simulating landfill conditions, cell phones were found to leak over 17 times the threshold for what is deemed, by national standards, hazardous waste.

Now, five years after the INFORM report was published, we are, according to the EPA, recycling a little less than 10 percent of our e-waste and are ditching more like 130 million cell phones per year—a pretty sorry improvement considering the national awareness of recycling things like glass, paper and aluminum. Part of the problem is likely the inaccessibility—real or perceived—of e-recycling programs, but the bigger culprit may be the opacity of the electronics-recycling industry itself.

Very little e-recycling is done in-house. The toxic substances in electronics, though valuable when reclaimed, are expensive and difficult to extract whilst complying with U.S. environmental standards; many recycled electronics wind up passing through a string of middlemen before being sold off to developing countries with low environmental regulations. There, products are disassembled by hand—in many cases by children's hands—poisoning water supplies and causing a slew of health problems including birth defects, neurological and respiratory disorders and cancer. The extracted substances of value, like gold and copper, are then sold back to U.S. companies. Manual, unregulated e-waste recycling in the Chinese town of Guiyu has made the surrounding water supply undrinkable and caused elevated levels of lead in the blood of children living in the area.

Several e-recycling services ensure old phones and computers are reused or dismantled safely. Since March of this year, the U.S. Postal Service is one such organization. The USPS launched a program of free, postage-paid, "Mail Back" e-recycling for small items like ink cartridges, mp3 players, digital cameras and cell phones. The USPS contracted with the Clover Technologies Group, which pays postage and collects mailed-in e-waste for recycling at plants in the U.S. and Mexico. The Clover Tech operations were audited by MBDC, the firm founded by cradle-to-cradle environmental guru William McDonough. Chicago was one of 10 cities selected to pilot the program. Mark Reynolds, a spokesman for USPS, told me Mail Back recycling has been popular with customers and will hopefully go national some time next year.

While I couldn't think of any e-waste lurking in drawers around the house, I figured I'd pick up a free Mail Back envelope or two to have on hand. My first stop was en route to work, at the P.O. on Division and Ashland. I looked around the racks of Ready Post shipping supplies, change-of-address packets and assorted shipping forms, but didn't see anything related to recycling. When I inquired with a postal worker, she returned a blank stare. She asked a co-worker if their branch carried the Mail Back envelopes. He silently shook his head. On my lunch break I figured I'd walk over and give the P.O. on Ontario and Michigan Avenue a shot; had a little more luck there—at least the employee I spoke with knew what I was talking about, but she told me they didn't carry the envelopes at that branch either. When I returned to my office, I decided to play it smart and call around. The Logan Square branch, not far from my house, said they had a few envelopes left. But by the time I arrived they were cleaned out. I was starting to understand why the e-recycling rate is so abysmally low. At least the Mail Back envelopes were popular when and where they could be found. Three post-office trips in one day was my limit, so I decided to head home. I don't anticipate needing to recycle any small electronics soon (knock on wood), so I'll give the USPS another shot when the time comes.

If you have an unused cell phone hiding in a drawer, send it back to be responsibly recycled through the USPS or one of these great organizations:

Collective Good sells your old phone on the secondhand market and give a percentage of the proceeds to a charity of your choice.

Green Phone helps you resell your old phone and plants a tree for each phone saved from a landfill.

The Basal Action Network, a watchdog group dedicated to eliminating "toxic trade," lists other responsible e-recyclers on their website.

It took a move from the regimented lawnscapes of the suburbs to the congestion of a major metropolis for Sharon to look twice at what she puts in the trash, down the sink and into her own body. She reports fortnightly on her endeavors to change "greening" from calculated deviation to a practicable way of life. You can contact her here.