CHICAGO, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- A mobile phone is a disposable product -- consumers buy a new one about every year and a half, and toss the old one in the closet. Then, years later, when they have a major house-cleaning weekend, they find a few old phones collecting dust and toss them out in the trash.
Experts told UPI's Wireless World this pattern is starting to become a major environmental issue, as old mobile phones start to fill up garbage dumps across the United States and leach lead, arsenic, gold and other toxins into the groundwater.
"There are a lot of heavy metals being released into landfills because of old mobile phones," said Chuck Harrell, an environmental supervisor with the Southeastern Public Service Authority, a government agency in Chesapeake, Va.
Now, mobile phone manufacturers such as Motorola Corp. are collaborating with environmentalists and the government to solve this emerging problem. Municipalities are joining to create mobile-phone recycling centers for their residents.
Technology companies are developing mobile-phone casings out of biodegradable materials -- even plant seeds, which sprout flowers after they break down in the ground after disposal. Other entrepreneurial firms are beginning to see this as a potentially major new business. They are setting up operations to collect America's old mobile phones, refit them and sell them in Latin America and South America, or donate them to American forces serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, so they can call loved ones for free or a reduced fee.
"We have been for some time looking at electronic waste as a whole," Harrell said. "Cell phones jumped out at as something we could do economically, and could do in a hurry."
The recycling program began just 45 days ago, he said.
"Prior to this, there was no convenient outlet for recycling mobile phones locally," Harrell said.
The authority serves eight municipalities in Southeastern Virginia, each of which has its own hazardous waste disposal facility. For the past month or so, the authority has been picking up mobile phones when it conducts its regular run to pick up hazardous household chemicals from homeowners. It picks up the phones at no charge. Businesses have expressed interest in the program, Harrell noted, and plans are in the works to retrieve their old phones, too, for a small fee.
The phones are then bulk-shipped to a firm in suburban Atlanta called Metal Conversion Technologies, which melts the materials down, frees the alloys and takes other parts and resells them. The parts are used to remanufacture batteries, Harrell said.
"In the nearly six weeks we've had this program, I would estimate that we've retrieved about 500 to 600 phones," he said. "I've had phone calls and inquiries from a government contractor that is looking to dispose of 2,000 phones now. We're figuring out how to handle that."
Brian Brundage, chief executive officer of Intercon Solutions, a recycler located in Chicago, said about 80 percent of the circuit boards in mobile phones are lead-based. The phones recycled at his plant yield lead, steel, gold, copper and plastic, which then are used in other electronic products.
"This helps reduce the amount of mining that has to be done for future materials," said Brundage, whose company has been awarded about $300,000 in grant monies from the state of Illinois to study future recycling processes.
Nationally, there currently are about 400 million mobile phones in use, but last year only about 5 percent of all those electronic devices were recycled, Henry Garcia, chief executive officer of Miramar, Fla., based GRC Wireless Recycling Inc., told Wireless World.
"Recycling cellular phones is becoming a hot issue," Garcia said. "Regulators in California and other states are looking at this. They are concerned about an environmental hazard."
Garcia's firm, which this year recycled about 1 million phones -- up from about 200,000 the previous year -- works with social services organizations throughout the United States, like the Salvation Army and the YWCA, to collect used mobile phones. The organizations received about $1.7 million for their efforts to recycle the old phones last year from Garcia's organization.
"They attract the assistance of other local businesses who collect phones on their behalf," Garcia said.
Once the phones are shipped to his company near Miami, they are sorted and appraised. Then they are resold to Latin America, which has a developing market for used American mobile phones.
Other businesses are emerging around the idea of recycling old mobile phones, said Tony Romando, editor-in-chief of Sync magazine, a cutting-edge, hip consumer electronics journal in New York City.
"Ring tones and games are options on mobile phones today that are really popular," said Romando, formerly an editor at Rolling Stone magazine. "But the options are going far beyond that now. There are biodegradable casings for mobile phones, made out of sunflower seeds. Once they are thrown out and they break down, they sprout flowers. There may be a whole portion of the population that wants these."
Romando said his magazine is calling the devices "green phones." He also said smaller entrepreneurs are setting up kiosks in shopping malls, offering customers payment in exchange for old mobile phones. They then resell the phones or recycle them.
"A few entrepreneurs are realizing the opportunity here," said Romando, referring to the firm, cellforcash.com and other start-ups. "It's amazing what people are doing."
Ultimately, this trend is about environmental stewardship being exercised by companies -- as well as the government, Harrell said. "This is becoming a national trend."
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Wireless World is a weekly series examining the social, cultural and economic impact of mobile telephony technology, by Gene Koprowski, who covers technology for UPI Science News. E-mail [email protected].
