SACRAMENTO, Calif.- Legislation establishing the nation’s first cell phone recycling law has passed the California State Assembly and now advances to the Senate. The law would require any entity selling mobile phones to take them back and recycle them at no cost to the consumer.
Some 40,000 cell phones become obsolete every day in California, said Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, co-author of the Assembly Bill 2901. Circuit boards in the phones contain toxins such as arsenic, beryllium and lead, which could leach into groundwater if thrown away in landfills or be released into the air if burned in incinerators, she said.
“That’s a serious threat to human health and our environment and we need to provide a real alternative,” Pavley said.
The bill also calls for a public education program to ensure Californians recycle their old phones.
“The truth is that up to 75 percent of those phones are stockpiled because people don’t have any information about what to do with them and probably don’t know how much hazardous material their phones contain,” said Assemblywoman Christine Kehoe, who also co-authored the bill.
The mobile-phone industry, which opposes the bill, has several voluntary collection programs that its members operate. But those programs collect less than 5 percent of obsolete phones, Kehoe said.
“Our goal is nothing less than recycling or reuse of 100 percent of discarded cell phones,” Pavley said.
Results from a study released in February showed many cell phones release enough lead for the federal government to classify them as hazardous waste. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency funded the study, which the University of Florida spearheaded, to identify the potential risk of toxic substances to leak into the air and groundwater.
The university subjected several electronic devices, including cell phones, to the EPA’s standard test for hazardous waste, the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure. The procedure, designed to simulate landfill conditions, involved grinding up the electronics and mixing them with an acid solution.
It tested for eight hazardous metals: arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, selenium and silver. Lead was the only concern, with 28 of 38 cell phones tested exceeding the EPA standard of 5 milligrams of lead per liter. RCR
Joe Truini is a reporter at Waste News, a sister publication of RCR Wireless News also published by Crain Communications.
