Phone Switching Rule Will Trash Millions of Cell Phones

WASHINGTON, DC, November 25, 2003 (ENS) - Millions of unwanted cell phones will result from Monday's ruling by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that in the words of FCC Chairman Michael Powell "your cell phone number belongs to you, and you can take it with you" when you switch phone service providers.

Portability of cell phone numbers will prompt a carrier switch for as many as 13 percent of cell phone users within a year, according to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll.

That means 19.8 million people could discard their current cell phones even though the FCC ruling applies only to the top 100 U.S. cell phone markets until May 2004, when the system kicks in for the rest of the country.

People who make the switch will have to buy new phones because different carriers use different encryption systems, and their old cell phones will not work with a new carrier's system.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) predicts that cell phones will be discarded at a rate of 130 million per year by 2005, resulting in 65,000 tons of waste.

Surplus cell phones for sale by the state of Maine (Photo courtesy Maine State Surplus Property)

An estimated 100 million cell phones, weighing approximately 50,000 tons, will be retired this year, according to a new report issued Monday by the New York based environmental research organization Inform, Inc.

The report, "Calling All Cell Phones: Collection, Reuse and Recycling Programs in the US," finds that cell phone collection programs have recovered less than one percent of phones retired and discarded since 1999. Some 2.5 million phones were collected from 1999 to early 2003 by the programs studied, but hundreds of millions more entered the waste stream.

This cell phone waste flow will increase now that the cell phone number portability rule has become law, Inform predicts.

Eric Most, author of the new report, says, "At current rates of recovery, hundreds of millions of used cell phones will soon wind up in landfills or incinerators where they'll release arsenic, lead, cadmium, and many other toxic materials that threaten human health and the environment."

The Inform report focused on four of the leading cell phone recycling programs in the country, including the Wireless Foundation's Donate a Phone programs, The HopeLine Program run by Verizon Wireless, The Charitable Recycling Program, and CollectiveGood International.

CollectiveGood and Staples now offer a nationwide mobile devices recycling program in all Staples stores that makes it easy for customers to recycle their used cell phones, PDAs, pagers and rechargeable batteries. A portion of the proceeds generated from recycling the devices will be donated to the Sierra Club.

CollectiveGood, a mobile phone recycling company, sends the mobile phones that are dropped off at Staples for reuse in developing countries. These phones provide affordable, modern communications for many people, but rarely do the destination countries have their own recycling programs for the devices once they are discarded.

CollectiveGood recycles the components that cannot be repaired or reused in compliance with EPA environmental protection procedures.

Used cell phones help Angel's Wish charity for homeless animals in Wisconsin. (Photo courtesy Angel's Wish)

The EPA’s “Plug-In To E-Cycling” program for electronics recycling is supported by 12 companies including Wal-Mart, Sony, Sharp, Staples, Panasonic, JVC, Dell, Best Buy, AT&T Wireless, Recycle America Alliance, Envirocycle and Nxtcycle, and close to 30 public partners.

AT&T Wireless and Best Buy also collect used electronics and cell phones in drop-boxes in their stores.

Twenty-two public libraries in southeastern Minnesota are collecting cell phones as a free recycling service to community and business members as part of the Minnesota Waste Wise Cell Phone Recycling Program. Cell phones can be dropped off at the public libraries during regular library hours.

But although these programs operate with the best of intentions, according to Most, they are no match for the growing heaps of cell phone trash. "Existing U.S. collection programs are making steps in the right direction," Most says, "but they're operating at a scale and scope that is dwarfed by the monumental size of the problem."

The Inform report recommends that to be effective cell phone recycling programs need to offer convenient, permanent drop-off sites in high-traffic locations within communities, such as shopping malls, supermarkets, banks, and post offices.

Programs need to be broadly and aggressively publicized, and temporary drives must be replaced by permanent collection systems, Inform suggests. Especially in the case of a company with numerous retail locations like RadioShack, a Donate a Phone program partner with about 7,100 stores nationwide, ongoing collections "could make a real difference in recovery rates," Inform says in its report.

And finally, Inform recommends that phones sent abroad should be returned to the United States for reuse and recycling, or systems need to be established that enable these phones to be collected, reused, and recycled abroad. Revenues generated from the sale of refurbished phones and recyclable materials could be used to cover the costs of this infrastructure.