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LESS THAN 1% OF USED CELL PHONES RECOVERED BY LEADING
U.S. PHONE COLLECTION PROGRAMS -- MILLIONS GO TO LANDFILLS OR INCINERATORS
New Study Recommends Ways to Make Cell Phone Collection, Reuse and
Recycling Effective to Reduce Toxic Waste and Make Money
new report by the national environmental research organization INFORM,
Calling All Cell Phones: Collection, Reuse and Recycling Programs
in the US, reveals that leading cell phone collection programs have
recovered less than 1 percent of phones retired and discarded since
1999. Approximately 2.5 million phones were collected from 1999 to
early 2003 by the programs studied, leaving hundreds of millions more
to enter the waste stream.
Calling All Cell Phones' research indicates an estimated 100 million
cell phones, weighing approximately 50,000 tons, will be retired this
year alone. An additional surge in this toxic waste flow is expected
to follow the cell phone number portability rule (effective today)
as millions of consumers change wireless services and discard their
incompatible cell phones.
Cell phone collection programs are the focus of this new report because
INFORM found them to be the primary strategy in the US for dealing
with the rapidly escalating cell phone waste problem researched in
its groundbreaking 2002 report, Waste in the Wireless World. "At
current rates of recovery, hundreds of millions of used cell phones
will soon wind up in landfills or incinerators where they'll release
arsenic, lead, cadmium, and many other toxic materials that threaten
human health and the environment," said Eric Most, author of
the new report. "Existing US collection programs are making steps
in the right direction, but they're operating at a scale and scope
that is dwarfed by the monumental size of the problem
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