March/April 2006
More cell phones are used and discarded every day. The good news is that—thanks to their resale potential and precious metal content—they have a positive RECYCLING value now the biggest challenge is getting consumers to hand them over.
By Theodore Fisher
Here’s a wake-up call: The United States now has more than 200 million cell phone subscribers, according to the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. That’s nearly two-thirds of the total U.S. population. If the average cell phone lifespan is only 18 months, as the environmental research organization INFORM estimates, the U.S. population now retires about 100 million cell phones a year.
What happens to all those old phones? The vast majority of them—up to 95 percent, according to some estimates—are sitting in closets, desk drawers, glove compartments, and other holding areas as they await final disposition. Of the remainder, some used phones are sold, usually winding up overseas. Some are disassembled, their constituent parts becoming new phones, repair parts, and other products. But many end up in the trash, where they have the potential to harm the environment.
An INFORM report, “Calling All Cell Phones: Collection, Reuse, and Recycling Programs in the US,” describes the discarded phones’ potential effect on the environment. “The problem is what’s in them—the toxic substances that could end up in a landfill or incinerator,” such as lead in circuitboards and flame retardants in phone housings, says Lloyd Hicks, INFORM’s director of solid waste prevention.
Lead is the primary pollution concern, the report says. This hazardous element appears in the solder that attaches components to each other and to the printed wiring board. In some laboratory tests, the lead in circuitboards leached at unacceptable levels. Another concern is brominated flame retardants, which manufacturers add to the plastics used in the wiring boards, cables, and housings. If incinerated at the wrong temperature, they can create dioxins and furans, which have been linked to cancer and disruption of the immune and endocrine systems. (A European Union ban on the sale of electronics containing some brominated flame retardants takes effect this July.) The phones’ rechargeable batteries are problematic as well: As companies phase out the older nickel-cadmium (NiCd) batteries, which contain the probable human carcinogen cadmium, they replace them with lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries, some of which contain heavy metals that could pose environmental hazards. Moreover, some integrated circuits and semiconductors contain arsenic.
“No matter who you talk to in the industry, people want to see this issue addressed because it’s the right thing to do,” says Jason Linnell, executive director of the National Center for Electronics Recycling (Davisville, W.Va.). Whether they’re motivated by a growing awareness of the problem, an interest in improving the industry’s image, the specter of legislation mandating recycling, or the opportunity to make a profit, increasing numbers of companies and organizations are entering the field of cell phone recycling.
Take-Back Programs
Cell phone take-back programs draw phones out of the closet by offering consumers opportunities to do well or to do good. Phone owners can do well by selling their old phones via the Internet, sometimes for substantial sums. CellForCash.com, which receives 80,000 to 100,000 phones a month, offers cash for 500 models of phones from 21 manufacturers. The site pays an average of $30 a phone, with current prices ranging from $4 to $263 (for a Handspring TREO700w), including a free postage-paid box for shipping.
“Unlike fine wines, cell phones don’t get better with age,” says James Mosieur, chief executive officer of RMS Communications Group Inc. (Ocala, Fla.), which operates CellForCash.com. “A phone that’s been sold or manufactured in the last 18 months is going to have some pretty good value,” whereas older phones are worth less—or nothing. Sellers can find out the going rate for their phones on the Web site.
Consumers can do good by donating phones to one of the numerous take-back programs that keep the phones out of landfills, contribute to charity, and even assist people in developing countries. CTIA sponsors “Wireless… The New Recyclable” (www.recyclewirelessphones.com), a campaign to publicize charity-oriented recycling initiatives of the association’s member companies, such as Sprint and Verizon, as well as its Call to Protect program, which uses the proceeds from the resale or recycling of phones it collects to aid domestic violence shelters.
In 2004, the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corp. (Atlanta) expanded its efforts to recycle rechargeable batteries by introducing Call2Recycle, a nationwide program for collecting cell phones and their batteries. “As cell phone usage continued to grow, RBRC recognized that each phone that was being retired contained a rechargeable battery,” says Ralph Millard, executive vice president. “Since our primary goal is the collection and recycling of rechargeable batteries, it just seemed like a natural fit.”
In 2005, RBRC collected more than 115,000 phones in more than 30,000 Call2Recycle collection boxes in the United States and Canada. Most boxes are in retail stores—Radio Shack, Sears, Target, Home Depot, and Lowe’s, among others—but some 2,600 are in other businesses and 4,300 are in police stations, firehouses, municipal buildings, and other community sites. The cell phones are recycled or refurbished and resold when possible, with a portion of the proceeds from the resold phones benefiting national charities such Boys & Girls Clubs of America. “The best thing about our program is that it’s free and convenient,” Millard says. “Free to the retailer, free to the communities, free to absolutely everybody.”
One retailer committed to cell phone take-backs is Best Buy. “We were the first and remain the only retailer that has a permanent fixture in every one of our stores” to collect cell phones, says Brenda Mathison, director of environmental affairs. Best Buy sends the Boys & Girls Clubs of America a dollar for every phone it receives, but Mathison says the take-back effort also serves a higher global purpose. “The U.S. has a land-based communication system, but in other countries, cell phones are the only mode of communication,” she says. “The companies we do business with have connections overseas, and some actually operate storefronts for the resale of refurbished equipment” in developing countries.
Refurbish or Recycle?
What happens to all those donated or sold phones? A huge proportion of them make their way to ReCellular Inc. (Dexter, Mich.), which has been buying, selling, refurbishing, and recycling cell phones and other electronic equipment since 1991. “We manage the majority of cell phone recycling programs in the country,” says Mike Newman, vice president. “We receive 15,000 phones every day and reuse as many of them as possible.”
Newman describes the process for separating potentially refurbishable phones from recyclable scrap as “100 percent market-driven.”
“About 40 percent have no value for reuse, either because the phone is damaged beyond repair or it’s such an old model of phone that there’s no market anymore,” he says. “We still get bag phones and ‘bricks,’ those first-generation Motorolas that were shaped like bricks.” For those, it’s obvious there’s no resale market, he says. “For others, we just do a simple economic analysis that shows what the market will pay, and that determines whether we refurbish it and sell it or simply send it to be recycled.”
ReCellular is committed to disposing of those end-of-life phones in an environmentally sound manner. “We have a zero-landfill policy for everything we collect,” Newman says. “The phones, the batteries, the leather holster, the plastic casing—everything is sent to some downstream recycling” within the United States.
The Recycling Process
“There is nothing not recoverable on a cell phone,” asserts Craig Boswell, vice president of operations for HOBI International, an electronics recycling firm with facilities in Dallas and Batavia, Ill. HOBI obtains phones from a variety of sources—collection programs, manufacturers, carriers—and then decides whether to refurbish the phones or
disassemble them to recover resalable parts and recyclable commodities.
The disassembly process is basically just the reverse of the assembly process, Boswell says. “We remove the screws so the housings come apart. The housings go in one direction and then, depending on the model, [we] remove the LCD [display] in different ways. The circuitboards are left, and they go into a bin to be shredded and processed for precious metal recovery.” He places the value of the recycled metals at about $1.80 a pound, with recycling costs about $1 a pound.
The precious metals in a phone are primarily gold, up to 10 ounces per ton of phones (not including the batteries), plus silver, copper, and traces of palladium. GRC Wireless Recycling (Miramar, Fla.) sends phones with no reuse value to an overseas smelter for refining. “They shred them, smelt them, and recover the precious metals for us,” says co-owner Marc Leff. “They do what they call an assay, a sampling, and they pay us what they believe is the percentage of gold, silver, copper, and palladium.”
Recovering the metals is both economically and environmentally smart, according to a recent U.S. General Accountability Office report, which notes that extracting metals from used electronics can keep these valuable resources from sitting in landfills. Plus, it can use fewer land and energy resources and have less of an impact on the environment than extracting such metals from ores.
Recyclers also report a decent market for LCDs, at least ones from recent phone models, but the housing is a somewhat less precious commodity. “The housing is predominantly ABS plastic, although there’s some acrylic contamination and often some metal contamination,” Boswell says. “It’s a fairly expensive plastic, but the problem is getting it in a state that’s recoverable.” Housings that are painted or in multiple colors are contaminated, and some contain metal that the processors must remove. “There’s some value in [the plastic], but it’s an arduous process to recover that value,” Boswell says. “Finding a better way to recover the plastics is probably the greatest focus of our industry as a whole, because every day more and more product becomes plastic.”
For now, though, the housing has little recoverable value except for how well it burns. “Significant BTU value can be realized” from burning many of the plastics cell phones contain, says Amanda Hale, environmental, health, and safety manager for United Recycling Industries Inc. (Franklin Park, Ill.). “Due to the current high cost of fossil fuels, these BTU’s can translate into reduced processing charges from some of the primary refiners,” she says.
Legislative Mandates
Even as voluntary collection programs chip away at the problem, several states are trying to make cell phone recycling the law of the land.
On July 1, when California’s Cell Phone Recycling Act goes into effect, the state will require cell phone sellers to take back old phones at no cost to the consumer via on-site containers or alternative recycling methods. Supporters of the legislation contend that Californians discard 45,000 cell phones every day, only 5 percent of which are recycled.
In anticipation of the new law, last year the cell phone industry launched RecycleForCalifornia.com. Consumers can go to that Web site to sell newer phones (RMS Communications Group runs the site, thus the rates are the same as those on CellForCash.com) or to get directions to more than 1,000 drop-off locations. The site also offers businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations information about becoming drop-off locations, hosting collections, and publicizing the program.
In Maine, which in January 2006 became one of the first states to require the recycling of almost all end-of-life electronics but cell phones, state representative Chris Babbidge has introduced a cell phone recycling bill similar to California’s that would place any program costs “on the front end of the purchase,” he says, requiring cell phone manufacturers and retailers to accept used phones. “The great bane of any recycling system is inconvenience and cost at point of discard,” he says. “I’m trying to avoid both those pitfalls.”
State legislatures in Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, and Virginia considered mandatory cell phone recycling bills in 2005, and New York City, where battery recycling becomes mandatory this December, also is considering such regulation.
The cell phone manufacturing industry believes its members’ existing programs work well enough and opposes state and local mandatory recycling laws and any national legislation that would supersede them. “We believe that state-by-state regulation is counterproductive, and a one-size-fits-all national approach is not workable for the entire electronics industry,” said Steve Largent, president and CEO of CTIA, in testimony last September before the Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. “Rather, this challenge demands a comprehensive, voluntary national solution tailored to address the issues raised by mobile phone and mobile device end-of-life.” (ISRI Chair Joel Denbo testified at that same hearing, urging manufacturers of all electronics to adopt ISRI’s Design for Recycling® concept and create products without hazardous or toxic components that make them difficult to recycle.)
Though ReMA advocates a national legislative solution, in the short term the association suggests the voluntary approach because, unlike some other obsolete electronic products, cell phones have a positive recycling value, says Eric Harris, ISRI’s director of governmental and international affairs. Add the opportunities for refurbishment and resale of newer phones to the end-of-life recovery of precious metals, and “the economics work,” Harris says. “Cell phone recycling becomes cost-effective because the flexibility and ability to share costs can offset some negative costs, for example with older models that have less chance of reuse or refurbishment.”
Nationwide regulation of cell phone recycling is not expected to make it on the agenda of the current Congress. With or without legislation, however, cell phone recycling is likely to remain a growth industry—assuming consumers cooperate. “We have the technology to recycle the phones,” says HOBI International’s Boswell, “but getting them from the source—in this case, individual consumers—to me, or to Best Buy, or to any of the programs relies first of all on consumers being aware, then being internally motivated to throw them into their pocket or their purse and drop them off.”
Theodore Fischer is a writer based in Silver Spring, Md.
More cell phones are used and discarded every day. The good news is that—thanks to their resale potential and precious metal content—they have a positive RECYCLING value now the biggest challenge is getting consumers to hand them over.