Popularity is not without problems. Approximately 3.5 million of the cellular phones manufactured every year end up in landfills across the country, according to industry estimates.
The Environmental Protection Agency believes that only a federal law will stop cell-phone users and industry from dumping handsets in dumpsters and landfills.
“So long as there are no laws from Congress, the cell phones will be disposed of along with milk cartons and banana peels,” said Chris Paulitz, a spokesman for EPA.
Besides the fact that phones are not biodegradable, other dangers include that the phones house nickel cadmium, metal hydride, lithium ion and small sealed lead, which can cause cancer. The situation may worsen, fear industry watchers, as a garden variety of handheld devices continue to flood the market.
“One day, one kid is going to find a battery’s lithium ion in the trash and eat it and die or be very sick,” said Walter Giera, president of Returnsport, a reverse logistics company that recycles and reconditions phones and other electronic gadgets. “And all of a sudden, the manufacturers will be aware of their responsibilities.”
In Europe, the laws forbid wireless phones to be discarded and huge penalties, including fines, are imposed on violators.
With increasing inventory levels, cell-phone makers and carriers are often reluctant to accept reconditioned phones and are inclined to pass them on to distributors, resellers and recycling companies because of the cost to recondition the phones.
“It costs the manufacturers and carriers more to recondition the phones,” commented Giera. “Anytime a phone is reconditioned, they lose a sale.”
Seth Heine, president of Collective-Good International, which reconditions phones for distribution in less-developed countries, believes that about 220 million cell phones have been dumped in landfills across the country during the past 12 years.
Heine stressed that in the long run, it is cheaper to recycle phones, rather than allow them to be disposed of with abandon.
“The cost of properly disposing of a mobile phone is quite low-pennies, in fact,” said Heine. “The social cost of not recycling these devices is profound, resulting in environmental pollution, as well as allowing the expansion of the Digital Divide in the developing world, which impacts those economies and the quality of lives of millions of people.”
Although environmental groups in the country have remonstrated against the perils of throwing a range of electronic products into landfills, there largely has been silence on the issue of cell phones.
“Most of them concentrate on computers and related electronic gadgets,” said Giera.
Paulitz said in the absence of congressional action, cities should introduce laws and take actions to ensure that the cell phones are recycled and not dumped indiscriminately.
The San Francisco City Council passed a resolution June 25 that the state force computer and electronics makers to account for wastes of their products. A few other California cities have passed similar resolutions.
Giera said major retailers contribute to the problem of dumping cell phones because they are often overstocked with lower-end models. The retailers then ask reverse logistics companies to de-brand their inventory and sell them to resellers. “They buy the phones as well as PDAs without warranties and pay us to de-brand them,” he said. “We put model numbers on them and send them to resellers in reconditioned mode.”
Resellers and others that refurbish them eventually junk the unsold phones-and they have insurance policies that cover them against any liability for disposing of those phones.
But changes are under way to improve the situation.
Companies like IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have designed a program in which the buyers of their notebook computers are asked to pay for the recycling of their products. IBM charges $30.
And a pilot program is scheduled to take off this fall comprising a wide spectrum of the wireless industry that will ask retailers to hand over all unused phones to the reverse logistics companies to refurbish and recycle.
Giera said the idea is to encourage phone users to drop their phones at the retailers, which will pass the old phones over to refurbishers. The program will need publicity to be successful, Giera said, adding that RadioShack’s program has not had as much success as it should because a lot of people do not know about it.
Vendors like Nokia Corp. and L.M. Ericsson say they adhere to strict environmental standards and recycle their entire excess inventory. The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corp. recycles the batteries. Nokia’s spokeswoman Virve Virtanen said her company has begun the donate-a-phone program to give refurbished phones to the needy and to the Classlink progam for students.
Nokia said that it has already run tests on biodegradable clip-on cover phones and hopes to develop it in a few years.
