The EPA Announces New Cell-phone Recycling Program This Week
This week, the EPA announced an easy cellphone recycling program partnership with key phone device makers and service providers. The goal is to redirect the 130 million cellphones that will be retired this year to a responsible afterlife. Through this partnership, there are multiple mail-in and drop-off opportunities to be reborn through cell phone donation, or recycled with care.
“The highest level, and from an environmental standpoint, what we can do is eliminate the need to create a new phone. That’ll eliminate the need to mine new materials, to go through a manufacturing process, and there are markets for the used phones that are viable that allow us to put those phones directly back into an active reuse environment”, Says Craig Boswell, VP of Operations from Hobi Recycling in an interview with the EPA. Cell phones contain enough lead to qualify as hazardous waste under federal regulations. Even lead-free phones are considered hazardous under California law because of the copper, nickel, antimony and zinc that leach into landfills.
Yet still, the industry pushes out new phones every year designed to barely last the length of the service contract. On the one hand, we should applaud the EPA for making cellphone recycling so much easier for consumer.
[Via]
