How to Buy a Smartphone: Recycling Old Cell Phones

Good smartphones are now cheap, which means good smartphones are now disposable.

According to the EPA, some 130 million smartphones are added to landfills every year. The lead, mercury, cadmium and other scary-sounding internal ingredients found inside can leak into groundwater and eventually find their way back into your mouth via the food chain.

We’re not just throwing away quality handsets, but also perfectly usable quality handsets, which can turn around and be resold.

But even an old iPhone with a cracked screen and dead battery still has use. Again, according to the EPA, every million smartphones recycled in the US results in 35,000 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold, and 33 pounds of palladium.

So whether intended for reuse, or set for recycling, don’t ever just throw your smartphone away.

Read the full content of this Article: http://www.notebookreview.com/howto/how-to-buy-a-smartphone-recycling-old-cell-phones/

 

Hopefully, the way we recycle, donate or re-purpose our dated gizmos will improve along with the statistics for consumer effort.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/what-an-ewaste