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Why Recycle Your Old Mobile Phone?

CMT United Kingdom has teamed up with Greener Solutions, the leader in end of life mobile phone recycling.  For every phone you recycle, CMT United Kingdom receives £2.00.

Please use the Freepost envelope that the office can provide.  All you have to do, is stick your old phone in there, seal, and pop it in the post.  No postage to pay.

Alternatively, if you have 20 phones or more, please call Greener Solutions on 0208 274 4040 to arrange for a FREE courier collection.  Why not get your office involved?

How many phones are lying about?

Mobile phones are typically used for only 18 months before being replaced.  Most of them will initially be stored away in cupboards and drawers, creating a stockpile of used phones that could end up in the trash.

What is the big deal about mobile phone waste?

Waste from mobile phone products is a subject of rising concern around the world. While this segment of the waste stream generally accounts for less than 0.1 percent of municipal waste in industrialized countries, it is growing much faster than the waste stream as a whole.

Moreover, it contains many toxic substances, including arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, zinc, and brominated flame retardants, which can be released into the air and groundwater when burned in incinerators or disposed of in landfills, creating threats to human health and the environment.

Finally, separating out the toxic materials in these products and disposing of them as hazardous waste is very costly.

What toxins are in the phone?

Mobile phones are complicated devices that include a printed circuit board (PCB), liquid-crystal display panel (LCD), keypad, antenna, speaker, microphone and a battery.  The PCB and LCD together account for 98 % of the mobile phone’s environmental impacts in production and recycling.  These components contain persistent and bio-accumulative toxic chemicals, (PDT’s), which have been associated with cancer and other reproductive, neurological and development disorders.

Arsenic (in chips made from gallium arsenide), antimony, beryllium, brominated flame retardants, cadmium, lead (used in the solder that joins the parts), nickel, palladium, silver, tantalum, zinc, and mercury are contained in components that make up a mobile phone in one way or other.  These components when discarded leak into groundwater from landfills, while toxins from incinerated mobile phones pollute the air, damaging our natural resources and severely impacting the human-food chain.

In addition many batteries contain cadmium or lead, which are classified by die US EPA as the two most hazardous elements as they are probable human carcinogens.  Batteries are toxic to wildlife, and it can pass through the food chain to humans, causing lung, liver, and kidney damage, and even death at high exposure levels.  Cadmium can leak into waterways from landfills and enter the atmosphere during incineration.