The idea behind recycling is environmental protection. The benefits of recycling include everything from energy savings and reduced emissions to reduced volumes of chemical waste.
Mobile phones are a primary source of harmful chemicals that may cause toxic contamination of the surrounding water and land. Among these chemicals are copper, arsenic, zinc, lithium, manganese, mercury, nickel, cadmium, palladium, beryllium and lead. Add to this the fact that the number of mobile phones being used in the world has dramatically increased from 100 million units in 1997 to a whopping 4.6 billion units in 2009 based on the data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). In America alone, the180 million mobile phones used in 2004 were estimated to contain 2,100 tons of copper; the 4.6 billion mobile phone units used by the world in 2009 could yield 53,600 tonnes of copper waste. Add to that the thousands of tonnes of other waste chemicals, and with only less than one percent of the millions of mobile phones discarded annually being recycled, the damage to the environment is expected to be severe and dramatic.
Toxic contamination caused by chemicals from mobile phones will lead to serious physical and physiological conditions ranging from simple poisoning to genetic mutations and increasing cancer rates. A bigger problem is that toxicity is transferred along the food chain with long-lived predators like fishes and even simple decomposers like bacteria acting as carriers of these metallic toxins.
It would therefore seem that one of the best ways to protect life would be to recycle metals and that includes the tons of metal in billions of mobile phones around the world.
