Cell Phone Waste: A New Toxic Burden

Got a broken or unusable cell phone on your hands? According to INFORM, a national environmental organization, a whopping 130 million cell phones are taken out of service each year in the United States. And with the advent of disposable units—talk-time limited phones made of paper or plastic and intended to be trashed once the minutes are used up—this number is only likely to increase. Each cell phone contains a dense accumulation of toxins, including arsenic, cadmium, and lead. What’s more, the flame retardant chemicals used in the plastic phone casings can form deadly dioxins and furans when burned in an incinerator, and they can leach into the groundwater when buried in a landfill.

So what’s a conscientious recycler to do? Until the cell phone industry takes responsibility for the toxic electronics that they produce (and we’re working on that), you can bring your defunct mobile phones to the Eco-Cycle/Boulder Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHaRM). There is no charge, and we’ll see to it that your phone is either refurbished and reused or dismantled into its constituent parts and recycled.

For more information on Eco-Cycle’s cell phone recycling program, call Eco-Cycle at 303-444-6634.