I live and work in the South East of England I am married with 4 children. I am the publisher of several websites my latest being Sim Card & Sim Free Phones & Dream Holidays
Thousands of lorry loads of electronic waste are hitting landfills yearly as consumers replace their mobile phones and scrape their the old ones.
According to The Independent, there are 11,000 tons of unused mobile phones in the United Kingdom that have not yet been disposed of. Most of these phones will eventually be thrown away, together with old laptops, MP3 players and games consoles. These electronic products contain toxic metals and other chemicals that leach into the earth when thrown into landfills.
It is estimated 1 billion mobile phone handsets are sold each year, with nokia supplying 1 million per day on their on. Most mobile phone service providers encourage new customers by supplying a free new handset for those who sign up to a new contract. While there are some companies that will recycle used mobile phones, the majority have little of no commercial value and are still thrown away.
"frightening" is how Johan Thomsen the manager at mobile phone operator Green Mobile, described the size of the problem
"The problem today is that people upgrade their mobile phones every year and only a small percentage of these phones are disposed of safely," he said.
According to Thomsen, around 100 million people upgrade their mobile phones each year in Europe alone, even though the average handset has a life of 5 years.
Green Mobile has come up with a novel way encouraging phone reuse they ask new subscribers to keep using their existing handset and rewards them with a lower tariff than is offered by companies that subsidise new phones.
The numbers of recycled phones is expected to increase as the problem of consumer electronic waste is highlighted to the public and stricter regulations force more the service providers to deal with the the problem. A recent ABI Research estimates that these factors, in addition to shorter handset replacement cycles and a greater demand for cheaper phones will cause the recycled handset market to be worth $3 billion by 2012, with recycled phone shipments topping the 100 million mark.
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