Why is recycling your old mobile such a good idea? Wouldn’t it be less effort just to chuck it in the bin? We’ve put together a list of the top five reasons to cash it, not trash it.
- Probably the most obvious, is to make extra money. There are a multitude of companies out there who will buy old mobile phones for cash or vouchers. Even broken handsets can roll in the cash.
- It’s good for the environment. Recycling your old phone keeps it out of landfill. Poisonous elements such as lead, cadmium and beryllium are present in mobile handsets and these can harm wildlife as well as creating a health hazard health, so the fewer that enter landfills the better.
- It can help people in poorer countries. Mobile recycling companies send some of the handsets they collect to these countries, where they are a vital link for people who otherwise couldn’t get their hands on a phone.
- The manufacture of just one mobile phone uses the equivalent energy of almost 40 gallons of petrol. The more mobile phones that are recycled, the more we energy we conserve, protecting our rapidly decreasing energy resources.
- Mobile phones contain small quantities of precious metals such as gold, platinum and palladium. With an estimated 80 million phones worldwide lying around unused, that’s a lot of precious metals that could be recycled, reducing the impact of mining for these metals on the environment.
