After buying that new phone, what did you do with your old one? Did you pass it on to another buyer or charity? Or did you recycle it as electronic waste?

This is the secret life of your phone after it is recycled.

Recycle
The need to recycle mobile phones is two-fold. First, phones that end up in landfills create an environmental issue because of toxic chemicals that could potentially leach into groundwater systems and affect local ecosystems. Second, as each phone contains rare and precious metals, discarding them directly is a huge waste of resources.

Up to 80 percent of a mobile phone can be recycled and reused. First, batteries are taken out and sent through a different recycling process than your mobile phone. Because they contain toxic materials such as nickel, cadmium and lithium, special precautions are made to prevent environmental contamination. Afterwards, your phone is shredded, heated and several measures are used to recover and re-use various parts. For example, separate metals recovery is where valuable metals are extracted from mobile parts. This includes gold, silver and platinum to name a few.

Plastic recovery reformulates and remoulds outer body plastic to be reused for other purposes. Other useful parts, such as battery connectors, PCBs (printed circuit boards), ICs (integrated circuits), lenses, microphones and screws, can also be re-purposed through recycling.

Europe
In Europe, the recycling of mobile phones is coordinated according to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, established to promote re-use, recycling and other forms of recovery of electric waste in order to improve environmental performance. The Basel Convention was also signed by 186 parties worldwide to protect human health and the environment against the adverse effects of hazardous wastes. These are all measures taken to promote the recycling of mobile phones.

So next time you buy a new phone, remember to recycle your old one!

 

To read about the life of your phone before you buy it, click here. 

 

Photo by Adrian Clark via Flickr.

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