How Can We Help Nature by Recycling Mobile Phones?

The world we live in needs loves attention and planning else we won't be leaving the world in the same state our forefathers left it for us. Due to continuous massive rapid advancements in the mobile phones industry, there are millions of mobile phones being launched every year by 100s of manufacturers without any control. It's like a race everyone wants to win without realising who will be responsible for the damage it will cause to the environment. Now Mobile phones have become such a big industry that they are backed up the governments, for instance, Huawei is backed up by the Chinese Government, Apple by USA and Samsung by South Korea. Mobile phones contain precisions metals such as Aluminium, Copper, Cobalt, Zinc, Lead, Nickel, Silver, Tin, Gold along with other materials such as plastic and glass.

There are more mobile phones in the world than people but the irony is that more than half of them are just lying around and are not being used or have already reached landfill somehow without being noticed. Below are some facts which will make readers understand how important is mobile phone recycling.

• Less than 10% mobile phones are recycled or reused every year whereas more than 70% of the mobile phones can be reused and can be resold but they do not manage to reach the recycling facilities appropriately.

• The average life cycle of a mobile phone has come down from 24 months to a mere 18 months due to rapid advancements in technology.

• Mobile phones contain toxic materials such as hexavalent chromium, arsenic, beryllium, and cadmium which are toxic to the environment and human beings.

• More than $60 million worth of Gold is dumped through mobile phones each year just in the USA.

• If not recycled appropriately, a Lithium-Ion battery from a mobile phone can easily toxicant more than 60,000 litres of water.

• The amount of new mobile phones launched every year, it is expected that the e-waste caused by mobile phones will be increasing at 8% per year indefinitely. 

Most of the parts in a mobile phone can be reused and mobile phone vendors need to manufacture mobile phones which can easily be repaired without putting pressure on the environment. But over the years especially in the last 6 years or so, it's been noticed that most of the vendors have taken especially measures to make sure that the mobile phones are not fixed but rather replaced by the users and that's why getting most of the smartphones other than Apple fixed, it's much cheaper to get it replaced making the old mobile phone a piece of junk no one wants. The problem with small devices such as mobile phones is the fact that they are small pieces of equipment containing too many different metals and materials from glass to gold and from tons of other chemicals in ICs and battery make it difficult for recycling to extract different materials. Most of the mobile phone recycling want to fix the mobile phones and sell them on a profit but when it gets beyond economical repair, it gets really difficult for the mobile phone recyclers to extract mineral and other metals from mobile phones and resell them on a profit.  

We as end-users have to adopt recycling to our daily lives and make sure everything, we use including personal gadgets to recycle so that the rate at which we are utilizing our natural resources can be slowed down but at the same time it will help us generate some extra cash. There is an urgent need for the governments to take decisions which will help them tackle this sort of new e-waste.