The Afterlife of Cellphones Article
The NYT Magazine recently wrote a great article about the recycling of cell phones, and offered a unique perspective about the materials reclamation facet of our business. Interestingly, the reporter also discovers that the company that processes handsets for the largest manufacturers and carriers in the US has lower standards for processing those devices (the majority of their business no doubt) than their charity programs, which begs the question of why Motorola, Nokia, T-Mobile and others ask them to lower standards and dump phones into developing world markets? Is this the kind of leadership does that demonstrate? CollectiveGood and GreenPhone.com both get honorable mentions by environmental groups and the wireless Industry as a whole for our leading edge practices for cell phone recycling, as well as our environmental stewardship and leadership in general.
By Jon Mooallem. NY Times. Posted January 2008.

Have you ever wondered what happens when you recycle your cell phones? Our friends at Inform have made a short video that is informative and shows you how our system ultimately makes 17 metals (including gold) available for reuse. As we note in our Peeling The Metals Onion newsletter article, this recycling process mitigates the generation of 6545 pounds of mining waste for every cell phone recycled. Enjoy the video about cell phone recycling and materials reclamation here.

Take My Powerbook, Please.
Computers, TVs, music players, and cell phones - we love them so much when they're new. There's nothing quite like that geeky thrill when you power up for the first time. After a few years, though, when there's crap stuck between the keys, a scratch on the screen, and yesterday's chip inside, it's time to sent that old Mac to the trash.
By Charles Bethea. Test Wired. Posted November 2006.

War, Murder, Rape... All for Your Cell Phone
Everyone's heard about the human rights abuses in African gold and diamond mines. But when it comes to their ultra-cool, razor-thin cell phones, American consumers won't get the message.
By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted September 14, 2006.

3 ways to toss an old cell phone
Every day, tens of thousands of toxic cell phones hit the landfill. But there are great alternatives -- including a couple that can save you money.
MSN Money, by Liz Pulliam Weston
September, 2006

Earthworks Report Card on the wireless industry:
August 30th, 2006 – Washington DC - Earthworks has issued a Report Card on the cell phone recycling programs of the top four wireless carriers in the US (Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless). Notably, ALL of these companies get an “F” for the poor implementation and communication of their programs - except for Verizon, who get a gentlemen's “D”. Furthermore, the major carriers’ choice of recycler also receives criticism for its distinct lack of transparency and for its unwillingness to commit to high standards of environmental stewardship. Why would the major wireless carriers choose a partner to recycle their handsets who refuses to disclose what they recycle in terms of quantity or where all of that toxic waste laden scrap goes? Great question – you should ask your carrier why they don’t choose a more responsible partner, as the Report urges on page 8!

CollectiveGood (Parent company of GreenPhone) is cited in the “Who Is Doing It Right” section (page 6) four our support of major retailers like Staples as well as the Working Assets Wireless program, and our commitment to the Basel Action Network Responsible e-Stewardship Pledge. Once again, our programs are exceptional due to ease of use (we have thousands of drop off locations throughout North America, as well as free postage for anyone in the US), and our commitment to the highest environmental standards in the industry...”

To download the full report, please click here. This is a pdf file.

WorldWatch report:
July 31st, 2006 - London, England -
WorldWatch, a non-profit organization based out of the UK writes a very interesting report about the burgeoning problem of e-waste globally. CollectiveGood (Parent company of GreenPhone) is cited twice for our innovative cell phone recycling and collection programs (www.collectivegood.com and www.greenphone.com), as well as for our commitment to the highest levels of environmental stewardship through the BAN Responsible e-Stewardship Pledge. It is worth noting that no other US based mobile phone recyclers are even mentioned, once again demonstrating our leadership in this growing field and the need for greater transparency and higher standards amongst other recyclers. As a correction to note, CollectiveGood sends about 50% (not 80% as cited in the report) of the phones processed through materials reclamation after parts cannibalization – that process reclaims 17 metals as well as thermal recycling of the plastics...”

To download the full report, please click here. This is a pdf file.

EPA Green Power Partner:
CollectiveGood goes “carbon neutral” through wind power generated Green Tags.
January 3, 2006

Of Imitators and Innovators
So what’s in a name?
May 15th, 2006

Small Business Development Council of Arlington:
GreenPhone and CollectiveGood honored with Innovative Social Entrepreneur Award by Small Business Development Council of Arlington, VA.
October, 28, 2005

The New York Times:
Out With the Old Phone, in With the Cash
July 7, 2005

Earthwork and CollectiveGood:
EarthWorks and CollectiveGood Announce The "Recycle My Cell Phone Campaign"
Atlanta, April 20, 2005

Basel Action Network:
CollectiveGood signs on as a Responsible E-Steward with Basel Action Network
Atlanta, March 28th, 2005

BBC News
Gadget growth fuels eco concerns
January 20, 2005

FULL ARTICLES BELOW

The Afterlife of Cellphones

1. Cellphones in Hell

Americans threw out just shy of three million tons of household electronics in 2006. This so-called e-waste is the fastest-growing part of the municipal waste stream and, depending on your outlook, either an enormous problem or a bonanza. E-waste generally contains substances that, though safely sequestered during each product’s use, can become hazardous if not handled properly when disposed. Those products also hold bits of precious metals like silver, copper, platinum and gold.

The Belgian company Umicore is in the business of reclaiming those materials. It extracts 17 metals from our unwanted televisions, computers and cellphones and from more ominous-sounding industrial byproducts like drosses and anode slimes. Umicore harvests silver from spent photo-developing solutions collected at American big-box stores and sells it to Italian jewelers. The company describes its work as “aboveground mining.”

Umicore has roots in actual mining. In the late 1800s, during the reign of King Leopold II, the firm mined copper in the African Congo and shipped it to a riverside smelter near Antwerp. Today the same property houses a sprawling, state-of-the-art $2 billion smelter and refinery. Here, metals are recovered and processed. Then they are sold, sometimes to Asia, where they are used to manufacture brand-new electronics. It’s a reshuffling of the colonial arrangement: an abundant resource is sent from richer countries to poorer ones, made into goods, then sent back. That resource is our garbage.

Umicore’s smelter was burning furiously at 2,116 degrees Fahrenheit one afternoon last fall. Two heavy-set men in blue overalls sat in the control room, staring expressionlessly through heat-shielded windows. They were eye-level with the mouth of the smelter — a pit 13 feet wide by 46 feet deep. A conveyor belt fed shredded circuit boards and scrap into the fire in a dim, fast blur. I imagined the black-and-white television in my mother’s basement, or my first blue Nokia cellphone — all the devices I’d gotten close to and outgrown — spilling out and squealing like lobsters in a pot.

The metals exit the smelter’s base as a glowing sludge. It streams into another caldron the height of a house. From there, it moves into tanks of acid. The acid is electrocuted. As electricity flows through the mixture, copper accumulates on the tank’s end plate. I watched a giant claw move across the ceiling, rip out the plate and, with a violent whack, cleave off a gleaming layer of 99.9 percent pure copper, with the unmistakable sheen of a new penny. It was thrilling to see something so clean and recognizable emerge from such an alien process.

After explaining the final stages, Thierry Van Kerckhoven, Umicore’s e-scrap manager, handed me another of the end products from this process: a one-kilogram bar of gold. It felt the way I thought it would, based on what you see in the movies: substantial, mesmerizing. It was worth about $24,000. “This gold is recycled gold,” Kerckhoven said. “This gold is green gold.”

Recycling feels good because we imagine it as just this kind of alchemy — which Umicore achieves with impressive environmental controls. The centerpiece is a monstrous gas-cleaning-and-filtration system that captures and neutralizes enough of the carcinogenic and endocrine-altering chemicals produced from melting e-waste, according to Umicore, that the faint yellow emission finally released from its smokestack easily surpasses the European Union’s air-quality standards. (Martin Hojsik, who campaigns against toxics for Greenpeace International, notes that the process followed by Umicore and its few, similarly equipped competitors around the world is “not entirely clean” but still “the preferable solution” for recovering metals from e-waste.) Ultimately, by weight, only 1/2 of 1 percent of the e-waste Umicore takes in cannot be safely sent back into the world in a usable form. “There is often a discussion of separating what is valuable from what is toxic,” Christian Hagelüken, Umicore’s senior manager of business development, told me. “But sometimes they are the same thing.”

This may never be more true than for cellphones. They are the most valuable form of e-waste. Each one contains about a dollar’s worth of precious metals, mostly gold. And while single phones house far less hazardous material than a computer — an old, clunky monitor can incorporate seven pounds of lead — their cumulative presence is staggering. Last year, according to ABI Research, 1.2 billion phones were sold worldwide. Sixty percent of them probably replaced existing ones. In the United States, phones are cast aside after, on average, 12 months. And according to the industry trade group CTIA, four out of every five people in the country own cellphones.

Umicore estimates that, together with its competitors, it received only 1 percent of all phones that were discarded globally in 2006. “This of course is a lousy percentage,” Hagelüken said. “Computers are also bad, but phones are the worst.” Our obliviousness has mostly kept them from being recycled at all. When we do bother, we may not know, or be able to control, where the “recycled” phones go. Many enter a secondhand market in the developing world through a receding series of middlemen.

Reuse, we are told, is as green a virtue as recycling. But with e-waste all the old ecological dogmas start to become ambiguous. Cellphones represent only a part of the world’s e-waste problem. But they are a key to understanding how complicated it is. They also embody the kind of high-tech products that we will be throwing away more of: easier to upgrade than repair, increasingly disposable-seeming but also deeply personal. As governments around the world, from the European Union to New York City, propose or pass laws to require the recycling of e-waste, there’s little consensus about what recycling actually means. No matter how close our relationship with our phones has become — how faithfully we keep them with us, how we hold them to our faces and whisper into them — we rarely wonder where they go when they die.

2. Cellphones in Purgatory

If we think at all about what to do with old phones, we may realize we can return them to the wireless industry. With the idea of extended producer responsibility gaining traction — the notion that businesses should manage the disposal or recycling of their products — most major carriers and manufacturers in the United States now run voluntary take-back programs. But because we stop wanting phones long before they’re unusable, they also represent a kind of neglected value, there to be capitalized on. Seth Heine, who founded the company Collective Good in 2000, recognized this early.

Collective Good is a profitable business that, as the name suggests, Heine also sees as a vehicle for philanthropy. People send in their phones, and Collective Good sells the ones that still work into a global secondhand market. A portion of each phone’s resale or scrap value goes to one of more than 500 causes — ranging from the Red Cross to the Humane Society to the Obama campaign — selected by the phone’s donor. Used phones are sold to people overseas who can’t afford new ones, and hazardous waste is kept out of landfills. “It’s a self-cleaning oven,” Heine says.

When I visited his office outside Atlanta a few months ago, Heine was introducing a new venture, GreenPhone.com, which pays donors directly for their phones. Mail a BlackBerry Pearl, for example, to GreenPhone, and Heine will cut you a check for $65. And because Heine still isn’t entirely comfortable with all the paper consumption this entails, GreenPhone also plants a tree for every check it writes.

Heine is 40, a whip-smart and mildly self-righteous environmentalist with an M.B.A. and a boyish love of sports cars. There’s a lava lamp on his desk, but also, hanging behind it, a motivational poster that says VISION. Recently, he moved most of his operation to a larger facility in Colorado. But phones were still arriving at the small Georgia warehouse when I was there; they come in prepaid envelopes printed off the company’s Web site or from collection boxes at every Staples and FedEx Kinko’s in the United States. Each month, Heine receives 20,000 phones of at least 800 different makes and models.

They were scattered around the room: silver ones, a battered flip-phone with a sticker of a wolf on it. A store in Beverly Hills had been sending boxes of gold-plated, limited-edition Dolce & Gabbana Motorola Razr phones, turned in when customers traded up for something even newer. “That phone can’t be more than six months old,” Heine said at one point. Later, he handed an employee a Nokia with a note rubber-banded around it. It was something a friend gave him at dinner; that happens all the time, he said, “when you’re the Fred Sanford of phones.”

Heine’s business succeeds or fails based on how well it can assess and then realize the value of each phone. “I refer to that as the pachinko machine,” he told me. “You dump in a phone and it rattles around. It’s got to come out somewhere at the bottom.” The question is, where?

Phones beyond repair, or with little value, are dispatched to Umicore for their gold. But because acquiring the phones costs so much — all those individual, prepaid envelopes add up — recycling them must be subsidized by reselling the reusable ones. The most valuable handsets find their way to a room across the hall from the storeroom, where two employees sell them on eBay. Most, however, are sold via private auction to a stable of about 20 different resellers. Some, once refurbished, will be sent to American consumers to replace broken phones under warranty or covered by insurance. But it’s through the resellers, and the unfathomable network of resellers they sell to, that many also end up overseas, where the price of new phones can be prohibitively expensive.

American wireless carriers like AT&T and Sprint offer new phones below cost, or free, as incentives to get customers to sign lucrative two-year service contracts. Users in much of the world don’t purchase contracts, though. They buy chunks of prepaid minutes instead and can transfer their phone from one carrier to another more easily. Foreign carriers have no incentive to offer great deals. Phones we get free can cost upward of $200 in Latin America or Africa — where customers have less to spend. “A lot of people in the developing world will never own a new phone,” Heine says. They depend on our castoffs.

Ever-changing technology means that specific phones work only in specific networks, but relatively few are obsolete everywhere in the world. As one reseller says, “There’s always a place to put the phone.” Small-time entrepreneurs known as aggregators prowl the Internet cobbling together orders of thousands of a single make and model. “There are many, many thousands of us,” Joseph Khan told me. Khan, who lives outside Los Angeles, works as a limousine driver but has a side business in phones. Recently, he claims, he purchased several thousand Qualcomm QCT-1000’s for $11 each and resold them in Ukraine for $121 each. The QCT-1000 was introduced in 1996. “The battery is the size of a printer!” Khan says.

The need to refurbish or even significantly repair most phones is another reason vast quantities of them end up overseas — particularly in Asia, where cheap labor and replacement parts make the cost of fixing all sorts of phones with cameras and color screens and other features so low that many buyers do not even care if the phones turn on.

America’s largest phone-recycling company, ReCellular, based in Michigan, sells millions of phones annually to 375 refurbishers in 40 different countries. Some of these refurbishers, Mike Newman, a vice president of ReCellular, told me, “are going to be highly sophisticated companies with really sparkling, huge plants,” while others might consist of an entrepreneur with “10 small stores in the Dominican Republic who has, in the back of one of them, a place where 10 people are doing some refurbishing — just sitting on some benches and old tables, taking off the housings and fixing them.” ReCellular handles the phones from most of the major recycling programs in America sponsored by wireless carriers, including Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. It expects to receive seven million phones this year. Financially, according to Newman, the “backbone of these programs is the resale of usable phones.”

It’s hard to track ReCellular’s or Collective Good’s phones. But Jack Qiu, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who has studied the movement of used computers and phones in China, describes one route phones take. In Kowloon, in Hong Kong, Pakistanis and other immigrants (often asylum seekers) import phones from Europe by the shipping container. These are fixed or cannibalized for parts in stalls at a local market. In the past, Nigerians and other African exporters swept in to buy tens of thousands of phones at a time, particularly so-called “14-day phones” — those that have been returned under warranty and used little. But recently, Qiu says, the markets for these phones have become saturated in African cities. So the Nigerians, needing to take their business to poorer African villages, have been leaving Hong Kong for Chinese cities like Guangzhou, where they can purchase cheaper, more heavily used phones from the larger refurbishing companies there. Many Nigerians have learned Mandarin in order to do business in Guangzhou, Qiu says, and the city now has an African-style coffee shop.

Africa is one of the biggest markets for used phones. Seventy-five percent of all phones in the least-developed African nations are cellphones — and usage in many places is increasing by 30 or 40 percent per year. Their impact can not be overstated, particularly where roads are poor and settlements separated by great distances, places that land lines never reached and now have no reason to do so. Consequently, cellphones are not easily abandoned — and, when they are, someone somewhere is still likely to see some value in them. Jim Puckett, the coordinator of the Basel Action Network, a nongovernmental watchdog group that focuses on e-waste, visited Nigeria in 2005. He describes, at one Lagos electronics bazaar, repairmen sitting on dirt floors under shelves of scavenged parts, jury-rigging phones back together, over and over again, until the things are absolutely dead.

“I’ve never seen the real end,” Qiu says. “I’ve seen landfills in China full of used computer parts, but I’ve never seen a single landfill of used mobile phones or phone parts.” The Chinese themselves “retire” between 200 million and 300 million phones every year, he says. These phones are sold in places like India, Mongolia, Vietnam and Thailand. And from Thailand, they are sold to buyers in Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Myanmar. In other words, the pachinko machine is global, and there are millions, or even billions, of phones still clattering down its channels.

In 2001, Basel Action Network filmed a documentary in Guiyu, China, a town overrun by shipments of old computers from recyclers in the United States and elsewhere. Guiyu’s residents, including children, make their living sorting, dismantling and burning computer parts or bathing them in nitric and hydrochloric acids to recover precious metals. This not only mobilizes a device’s hazardous constituents; it also creates new ones. The health consequences are immense; respiratory problems and elevated blood-lead levels in children are reportedly rampant in Guiyu and, around the time of BAN’s visit, the nearby river contained up to 2,400 times the World Health Organization’s acceptable threshold for lead.

In 2005, BAN found 500 shipping containers of electronics arriving in Lagos each month. Useless computers were being tossed into burning piles behind a marketplace. And the phones — no matter how many ramshackle resurrections they experience — will at some point presumably meet the same fate, Puckett says. “It sounds like a cellphone’s just a little thing — if you burn it it’s not such a big deal,” he explains. “But we’re talking about mass volumes going to countries that have no infrastructure or ability to deal with it.”

Moreover, manufacturers now sell “ultra-low-cost handsets” — new, no-frills phones specifically for consumers in the developing world. Some cost less than $20. These phones, says Badii Kechiche, a market analyst with Pyramid Research, are what really fuels the spread of phone usage across Africa — not the comparatively skimpy supply of our used ones. As a consequence, used cellphones — just rare enough to stay out of the planet’s globalized digital trash heaps so far — may come to be more like regular junk. “If ultra-low-cost handsets are coming in,” Kechiche says, “and they’re much cheaper or cheaper than refurbished handsets, what’s the point of getting a refurbished handset?” The people we rely on to take our garbage are not only losing their need for it. They’re becoming firsthand generators of that same garbage.

In a study published last year, 34 recent-model cellphones were put through a standard E.P.A. test, simulating conditions inside a landfill. All of them leached hazardous amounts of lead — on average, more than 17 times the federal threshold for what constitutes hazardous waste. Under a stricter state of California test, they also leached four other metals above hazardous levels.

The E.P.A. says modern American landfills are designed to keep toxics stewing inside from leaking out, so they don’t contaminate surrounding soil or drinking water. But landfills do fail, says Oladele A. Ogunseitan, an environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of last year’s study. More important, he notes, such landfills don’t exist in the developing world. In many places, garbage is tossed into informal dumps or bodies of water or burned in the open air — all dangerous ways of liberating and spreading toxics.

The electronics industry is greening significantly, though. E-waste take-back programs are starting to spread around the developing world. A landmark law, the RoHS directive, enacted by the European Union, requires all electronics manufacturers to drastically lower concentrations of hazardous substances, including lead, in their products. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are among those voluntarily phasing out other dangerous substances not covered by RoHS.

Still, according to Ogunseitan, there will always be risks, or at least unknowns, accompanying the improper disposal of such products. The compositions of consumer electronics evolve through long sequences of trial and error. “In a phone that you can hold in the palm of your hand, you now have more than 200 chemical compounds,” he says, citing the results of an analysis of one new cellphone. “To try to separate them out and study what health effects may be associated with burning it or sinking it in water — that’s a lifetime of work for a toxicologist.”

The laws governing the export of e-waste present their own difficulties. An international treaty restricting the movement of hazardous waste to the developing world, a 170-nation agreement called the Basel Convention, is ambiguous when it comes to electronics. Namely, when is an item repairable — and thus freely exportable as a reusable product — and when is it just hazardous waste? Nothing requires exporters to even test the products they ship. Consequently, exporting products for “reuse” is often used as a loophole to dump them. In any case, the United States has not ratified the Basel Convention.

Electronics recycling “has always been the used-car lot of the recycling world,” Seth Heine laments. With no clear standards to follow, he enforces his own. He claims to thoroughly assess the condition of all his phones. He’s also quick to send working phones with limited potential for reuse straight to Umicore rather than sell them for far more money to less scrupulous buyers in the secondhand market. Heine figures this means he is leaving $150,000 on the table each year, easily. (Several environmental groups I contacted, including BAN, singled out Heine for his integrity and seriousness about the environment.)

Mike Newman told me that ReCellular supports establishing standards for exporting phones. But he also questions their effectiveness. A company could say it doesn’t sell irreparable or untested devices to the developing world, but, “How does any company really know where their phones end up?” he asks. “Once you sell them, they’re not your phones anymore.” Newman claims that ReCellular tests all of its recycled phones anyway. But on the day we spoke, there were lots made up of hundreds and thousands of phones (even up to 15,000) listed for sale on ReCellular’s Web site and labeled Bulk Beyond Economical Repair and Bulk Used/Untested. Newman would later clarify: these phones were not from recycling programs. They were returned under carrier warranty programs; ReCellular acquires and resells tens of thousands of these devices too every month and doesn’t bother testing them.

Given this state of affairs, you can’t help wondering if throwing your old phone in the trash, and into the high-tech sarcophagus of an American landfill, could end up doing less damage to the environment than recycling it. But that ignores yet another crucial part of the equation. As Heine explains, even though what he sells will probably be thrown out eventually, if a phone gets three or four more lives, “it’s absolutely better for the environment than having to make three or four more phones — phones that wouldn’t be recycled, either.”

Reusing phones conserves natural resources, which reduces the environmental damage that comes with mining them. That damage isn’t necessarily obvious. When I called Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who specializes in solid-waste issues, he was less interested in discussing the toxicity of old electronics than the costs of mining a particular metal, tantalum, to build the capacitors for new products. Tantalum comes from an ore called coltan. Control of coltan deposits was a factor in perpetuating Congo’s civil war in the late 1990s, and the people mining it there now, Hershkowitz says, rely on “critically endangered” gorillas for food. Tantalum is one of the metals Umicore can’t recover from e-waste.

Much of the world’s gold and copper, meanwhile, is mined in open pits, which means it is leached out with cyanide or sulfuric acid. Using data from the United States Geological Survey and mining companies’ own reports, Earthworks estimates that mining the gold needed for the circuit board of a single mobile phone generates 220 pounds of waste. The environmental nonprofit calls this “an extremely conservative” estimate.

What’s more, the world’s supply of these metals is finite. So even as the E.P.A. plays down the risks of throwing e-waste into landfills, it also urges us not to. Tim Townsend, an environmental engineer at the University of Florida who has studied the toxicity of mobile phones for the E.P.A., sums up the absurdity of just tossing this stuff away: “If we know these metals are, overall, bad for us, it doesn’t make sense to keep digging them up from the earth’s crust and bringing them into the biosphere while — at the same time — we’re taking the ones we’ve already got and burying them.”

As with most environmental issues, then, no option for getting rid of a phone is free of trade-offs, and nothing is as simple as we’d wish. But the truth is, few of America’s phones are turned in for “recycling” in the first place. (It’s unclear how few. The figure of less than 1 percent, put forward in a groundbreaking report on phone recycling by the nonprofit Inform five years ago, is still repeated. ReCellular estimates that it’s more like 10 percent now.) While a phone’s small size may give even normally conscientious consumers a dispensation to slip it into the trash, there seems to be a more typical solution, what ABI Research estimates nearly half of Americans do: stick the thing in a desk drawer and leave it there.

Every recycler I spoke with talked about “the drawer.” It turns out to be the real purgatory for phones. Using predictions from Inform, the United States Geological Survey estimates that in 2005 there were already more than half a billion old phones sitting in American drawers. That added up to more than $300 million worth of gold, palladium, silver, copper and platinum. Heine says he still receives phones in prepaid envelopes addressed to the Kentucky tobacco barn where he started Collective Good in 2000. It tells him that people get motivated, take the envelope, then stick that in a drawer for a long time.

“As soon as [a phone] makes its way into the drawer, it’s hard to get people to dig it back out,” ReCellular’s Newman told me. I asked him how hard. “I have employees,” he said, “who have them in their desk drawers.”

3. Cellphones in Heaven

Given the intimate place of cellphones in our lives, why do we get rid of them so quickly?

Sometimes we don’t have a choice. We switch to a new carrier and must buy a phone adapted to its particular network. (Late last year, Verizon announced it would eliminate this requirement.) Or we trade up for new features: first a camera, then an MP3 player, then a Web browser. Apple’s iPhone promised to put an end to this chase by combining everything in a single, graceful device. But the industry knows the iPhone is just a momentary milestone in its race to replace laptop computers entirely — and that we will follow, one revolutionary but not-quite-perfect device at a time.

Regardless, recyclers say that from their vantage point it’s obvious that most phones are retired because of psychological, not technological, obsolescence. “There’s some fashion driving all of this and, by its nature, fashion is not eternal,” says Mark Donovan of M:Metrics, which tracks the wireless industry. Phones were initially an afterthought, given out free so that customers had something to talk into after buying the real product, the service contract. But carriers learned, as Donovan puts it, that “if you deliver something cool, and if it’s a bit of a status symbol, people will pony up and pay cash for it.” He adds: “People want them to become more than an awkward gadget. People want it to be an expression of their personalities.”

Right now, there are roughly 470 models of phone for sale in the United States. About 16 new ones come out every month. Many are only slightly altered versions of existing phones, suggesting how easily we get bored — how we’ll crave something that slides, say, instead of flips open. (There are currently 46 styles of Motorola Razr; Motorola has, in fact, projected which colors and finishes we’ll find most attractive through the year 2009.) And we have the perfect incentive to get whatever we want every two years when our contracts are up and the discounts for new phones roll around. When I asked Iain Gillott, an analyst with iGR, what makes a person get a new phone, he told me, “They’re cruising through the Sunday paper, and they see a fabulous phone for 50 bucks and they say, ‘Well, I haven’t had a new one in 18 months.’ ”

Gillott estimates 50 to 60 percent of phones are replaced “because people get tired of the design.” Otherwise, consumers want a new feature — even, it seems, if there’s no real need for it; according to M:Metrics, 82 percent of those with Internet-enabled phones do not go online. Steven Herbst, a psychology researcher at Motorola, told me: “All that pressure to have the latest — something that people will be impressed by — is compounded by the fact that all of a sudden somebody is doing something with their mobile phone that you can’t do.” In other words, it’s because we’ve made phones such deep and indispensable extensions of ourselves that we dump them so quickly. Who can bear seeing himself as even slightly outdated or incapable?

“Somewhere during the last 100 years, we learned to find refuge outside the species, in the silent embrace of manufactured objects,” Jonathan Chapman, a young product designer and theorist at the University of Brighton, writes in his book “Emotionally Durable Design.” But designers and consumers have snared themselves in an unsustainable trap, Chapman told me, since our affection for many high-tech objects is tied exclusively to their newness.

“The mobile phone occupies a kind of glossy, scratch-free world,” he says. Whereas a pair of jeans gains character over time, a phone does no such thing. “As soon you purchase it, you can only watch it migrating further away from what it is you want — a glossy, scratch-free object.” You might leave the plastic film over the display for a few days, just so you can take it off later and “give yourself a second honeymoon with the phone,” he says. But ultimately everything that first attracted you to it only deteriorates. You start looking at it differently. “It’s made of some kind of sparkle-finished polymer and it’s got some decent curves on it, but so what? The intimacy comes more from the fact that, within that hand-held piece of plastic, exists your whole world” — your friends’ phone numbers, your digital pictures, your music — and that stuff can be easily transferred to a new one. So you “fall out of love” with the phone, Chapman says.

Even the most idealistic visions of how e-waste should be recycled and reused take for granted that consumers and businesses will never reconsider why we are buying and discarding so many of those products, so quickly, in the first place. If the rush of castoffs isn’t likely to stop, we need to clear a proper path for it, considering all the inevitable compromises and costs along the way and delivering those products to as consequenceless a place as possible.

There is no heaven for cellphones. Wherever they go, it seems that something, somewhere, to some extent always ends up being damaged or depleted. The only heaven I came across was what Chapman described. It is an image in our heads — not of a place where we can send a used phone but one where we imagine each device when it’s brand-new, right before we first get our hands on it. That illusion of perfection, no matter how many times we see it spoiled, will always lure us into buying the next new phone and sending the last one careering on its way.

By Jon Mooallem. NY Times. Posted January 2008.

Take My Powerbook, Please.
Computers, TVs, music players, and cell phones - we love them so much when they're new. There's nothing quite like that geeky thrill when you power up for the first time. After a few years, though, when there's crap stuck between the keys, a scratch on the screen, and yesterday's chip inside, it's time to sent that old Mac to the trash.

More than 2 million tons of expired electronics are discarded in landfills each year, making ewaste the fastest-growing fraction of the municipal garbage system. These castoffs account for nearly 40 percent of the toxic heavy metals - like lead, cadmium, and mercury - found in dumps.

Some states already mandate ewaste recycling, but only recently have big electronics makes made it easy for customers to recycle their gear. In September, Dell began recycling programs for all if its products (www.dell.com/recycle). HP recycles computers, provided that you pay the shipping (www.hp.com/recycle). Apple users can now turn in their done-for machine (www.apple.com/environment/recycling). GreenPhone (www.greenphone.com) will resell your cell, - and send you a gift certificate or donate the proceeds to Hurricane Katrina relief.

For a list of electronics recyclers in your area, click on the map at the Computer Back Campaign’s Web site (www.computertakeback.com).

By Charles Bethea. Test Wired. Posted November 2006.

Note from GreenPhone: "It's pretty cool to read a mention about GreenPhone's phone recycling program in one of our favorite magazines... Only GreenPhone makes cleaning up the environment as easy, and rewarding as our unique service! As the article mentions, there are more than 2 million tons of expired electronics discarded in landfills every year - the number of cell phones that will be "retired" and are likely destined for landfill is a whopping 130+ million (and the cumulative size of all of the cell phones we have retired in the US is estimated at 750 million+). This makes e-waste the fastest growing fraction of the municipal garbage system. These castoffs account for nearly 40% of the Toxic Heavy Metals - like lead, cadmium and mercury - found in dumps. (learn more about Toxic Heavy Metals)

Interestingly, the above article about A Handset’s Heavy Metal doesn't mention the high environmental costs of mining (see Earthworks Report Card on the wireless industry ), nor does it mention Coltan, a metal that is used in cell phones with a truly horrible link to fueling civil war, rape and genocide in African nations (see article below for details)."

War, Murder, Rape... All for Your Cell Phone
Everyone's heard about the human rights abuses in African gold and diamond mines. But when it comes to their ultra-cool, razor-thin cell phones, American consumers won't get the message.
By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted September 14, 2006.

"As you crawl through the tiny hole, using your arms and fingers to scratch, there's not enough space to dig properly and you get badly grazed all over. And then, when you do finally come back out with the cassiterite, the soldiers are waiting to grab it at gunpoint. Which means you have nothing to buy food with. So we're always hungry."

That's how Muhanga Kawaya, a miner in the remote northeastern province of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), described his job to reporter Jonathan Miller of Britain's Channel 4 last year. Cassiterite, or tin oxide, is the most important source of the metallic element tin, and the DRC is home to fully one-third of the world's reserves. Some cassiterite miners work on sites operated directly by the country's military or other armed groups. Working in the same area are "artisanal" miners who are theoretically independent, like prospectors in America's Old West. But the cassiterite they extract is heavily taxed by the soldiers -- when it's not just stolen outright.

With a land area as vast as that of Texas, California, Montana, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado combined, the DRC has only 300 miles of paved roads. To reach one of the many cassiterite mines in the virtually roadless northeast, 1,000 miles from the national capital Kinshasa, Miller's team followed a 40-mile footpath that, he reported, was as "busy as a motorway. Four thousand porters ply this route carrying sacks of rock heavier than they are. Each of their 50 kilogram packs of cassiterite is worth $400 on the world market. Government soldiers often force porters at gunpoint to carry the rocks free of charge; if they're lucky, though, they can make up to $5 a day." (Watch Channel 4's gripping, award-winning report here.)

So, why should we care? Because without cassiterite rock and the other ores mined in the Congo we would be unable to manufacture the linchpins of our global "weightless economy" -- computers and telephones.

Greener phones, meaner mines

A horrific war among the DRC military and various rebel armies officially ended in 2003 after taking 3 million to 4 million lives. But fighting continued long after that in the northeast, fueled by mining profits. First-ever democratic national elections in July have set up an October runoff election in the DRC, along with great hope for the future. Meanwhile, disarmament and integration of the armies is being carried out. But soldiers frequently receive little or no pay, and that provides a strong incentive for them to squeeze what they can from the cassiterite business.

The majority of the ore moves through illicit channels across the northeastern border to Rwanda, enriching troops and middlemen along the way. The U.K.-based organization Global Witness has comprehensively documented the impact of resource extraction in the DRC in a 2005 report that described "killing, rape, torture, arbitrary arrests, intimidation, mutilation, and the destruction or pillage of private property" that soldiers used "to gain control either over resource-rich areas or over the ability to tax resources."

Since the July elections, says Carina Tertsakian of Global Witness, "labor conditions remain pretty much the same, especially in the informal sector." She says the DRC government now has slightly more control over the mines, "but that's not necessarily for the better." Despite pressure from the United Nations and European Union to pay members of its newly integrated armed forces more consistently, miners are being treated just as they were during the war.

In a cruel irony, Western efforts to make information-age products more environmentally friendly actually boosted incentives for violence and exploitation. In late 2002, the EU joined Japan in banning lead from the solder used in cell phones and other electronic goods. Traditional solder is an amalgam of 63 percent tin and 37 percent lead, but lead-free solder is composed almost 95 percent of tin. Partly in response to that new demand, the world price of tin shot up by almost 150 percent between August 2002 and May 2004, and has remained high since. As prices rose, fighting in the eastern DRC intensified.

Killer coltan

This wasn't the first time that fighters in DRC and Rwanda have reaped a mineral bonanza. Back in 2000, a spike in the price of coltan, an ore that is the source of the precious metal tantalum, spurred feverish mining, profiteering and suffering in the same area of northeast DRC where cassiterite is mined. The DRC controls an estimated 64 to 80 percent of world coltan reserves, and the windfall from mining those deposits funded a Rwanda-backed rebel army of as many as 40,000 soldiers during 2000-2002. The mining was also blamed for destroying habitat of the mountain gorilla; the gorilla population plunged by half in a national park where coltan was being mined.

Global demand for coltan increased with the growing use of tantalum in cell phones and other electronic devices. Whereas cassiterite is needed to make the products more eco-friendly, coltan is needed to make them more compact. Capacitors made with tantalum have an unmatched ability to hold high voltages at very high temperatures. Because of that, tantalum capacitors have been essential to the miniaturization of cell phones and other handheld wireless devices. At the time of the price spike, the No. 1 destination for the DRC's coltan exports was the United States. The prices of tantalum and its coltan ore have fallen from their 2000-2002 peak, but continued heavy demand from the electronics industry will keep their value high.

Getting a signal -- halfway to the moon

There's not much tin, and only a tiny amount of tantalum, in an individual cell phone; however, explosive growth in the wireless market has piled those metals up, milligram by milligram, into countless tons. In 2005, worldwide sales of mobile phones surpassed 200 million per quarter -- that means that factories are churning out 25 phones every second, around the clock. Customers typically discard and replace their phones every 18 months in the United States, and that cycle is said to be down to 12 months in Western Europe.

In the spring of 2001, some analysts were expressing doubts over a seemingly outlandish prediction that 1.7 billion people -- one out of every four on the planet -- would be wireless subscribers by 2006. As it turned out, the planet now has more than 2 billion subscribers, and the industry would like to sell a new phone to as many as of them as possible by the end of 2007.

Two billion of those little phones laid end-to-end would reach almost halfway to the moon. And that doesn't count the vast numbers already buried in landfills or abandoned in desk drawers.

As portable electronics acquire even more innovative features and (somehow) grow even smaller, their manufacture is sure to require even more exotic materials. And, more likely than not, those materials will come from some exotic location. Even before the handheld revolution, the United States was importing more than 70 percent of its tin, nickel, platinum and chromium, and more than 90 percent of its tantalum, aluminum ore, niobium and manganese. The EU and Japan are even more dependent on imports of those minerals, as well as silver, zinc, tungsten, gold, vanadium and copper.

Battery and assault

Cell phones, laptop computers and other portable electronics rely for their power on lithium ion batteries, which aren't just made of lithium. They contain copper and cobalt (often found together in a single ore called heterogenite) as well as nickel and iron, and generally have to be replaced every one to three years. (Up to 6 million will need to be replaced all at once with the recent recall of Dell and Apple laptop batteries). The DRC has 10 percent of the world's copper reserves and 30 to 40 percent of its cobalt, and with the prospect of a stable central government, the country's importance as a source of those materials for batteries and other uses is expected to grow.

The DRC's mines are in its southernmost province, Katanga, which went largely unscathed by the war that raged far to the north. Nevertheless, artisanal miners work under conditions that are only marginally better than those in the tin and coltan mines. They crawl through incredibly hot, cramped tunnels lit only by small flashlights or candles, using only shovels or their bare hands as tools. The BBC reported last year that the Ruashi mine employs 4,000 miners, some as young as 8 years old, who "dig and sieve from dawn to dusk."

Although transnational corporations are now rushing in to exploit the heterogenite deposits on an industrial scale, much of the ore is still being extracted by artisanal miners like those in Ruashi. Global Witness explained the danger in a July 2006 report:

Deaths usually occur when miners are digging holes -- sometimes 20 meters or deeper -- then digging horizontal corridors, known as kalolo or galleries, as they follow the cobalt or copper veins. The kalolo sometimes extend over stretches of more than 50 meters ... Those who remain at the top are usually the first to spot signs of crumbling earth and try to warn their colleagues of the danger -- often too late. As the mineshaft starts collapsing, they may attempt to rescue their colleagues trapped underneath. In some cases they succeed. In other cases, they have themselves been trapped by falling rocks, injured, and even killed in the process of trying to save their teammates.

There is an expectation in Katanga that after the October elections, foreign corporations will move in, putting an end to the more dangerous freelance mining. But the highly mechanized companies will be able to employ only a small fraction of the current artisanal miners, and, says Carina Tertsakian, there are already reports of clashes between corporate security guards and miners reluctant to surrender the sites they've been working.

Scary old phones

The level of exploitation continues to be affected much more by prices on the London Metal Exchange than by international efforts to protect workers or curb illicit trafficking of resources. Tertsakian says, "Organizations and journalists have created greater awareness, but I have to say we haven't seen that awareness translated into action." Even when Western manufacturers attempt to avoid buying Congolese minerals mined under deadly and exploitative conditions, they find it's not easy.

A great amount of the tin, coltan, copper and cobalt move out of the DRC via such roundabout and shadowy routes that it becomes almost impossible for a company at the end of the line to determine their origin. And human-rights-conscious consumers are even deeper in the dark. You can't boycott the assortment of metals in an electronic device the same way you can boycott a "conflict diamond" with a clearer history.

Demand for the minerals could be slashed if customers didn't replace their cell phones as often, and if when they did buy a new one, they no longer treated the old one as disposable. A myriad of for-profit and charitable organizations are now collecting unwanted cell phones for resale, donation or recycling. (Read the list of those who have taken a pledge of responsibility).

Yet the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) says that currently fewer than 1 percent of retired phones in this country are restored or recycled. With word spreading, that market may increase, and begin to affect the new phone market. As the title of an article in the current issue of Inc. magazine shows, manufacturers are already concerned: "Three Scary Words: 'Buy It Used'."

A 2004 California law requires sellers of cell phones to accept return of the instruments by their customers for reuse or recycling. It was passed in the face of the industry's intense nationwide efforts to defeat such mandatory take-back bills. Nationally, all four top wireless companies -- Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon -- have voluntary take-back programs; however, a "report card" issued in April by the Washington, D.C.-based environmental group Earthworks gave those programs an F.

Of the stores Earthworks visited, only 30 percent displayed information on drop-off and recycling, and only 50 percent of company representatives provided accurate information on the program. And companies could not verify that they were handling the returned phones according to best environmental and social practices, or that they weren't simply dumping many of them overseas.

Kimberlee Dinn of Earthworks says her group has seen some modest improvements in response to the report card. "There's a little more visibility of programs in the stores, more prominent mention on some of their websites. But not a single company has been able to provide us with statistics showing increased recycling of their phones."

To handle returned phones, all of the big four companies contract with ReCellular, Inc. of Dexter, Mich., which, according to Earthworks, is the only company to have been removed from the Electronics Recycler's Pledge of True Stewardship for noncompliance with its standards.

Dinn says California's mandatory recycling law has been a huge boon to ReCellular, which has grabbed 75 percent of the national market. CNN puts its market share somewhat lower, at 53 percent, and praises ReCellular for selling 55 to 60 percent of its still-functioning phones abroad, largely in poor countries where people can't afford new ones. That keeps waste out of U.S. landfills but also raises a question: If most used phones are being bought by people who would not have bought one otherwise, is reuse really cutting very deeply into demand for minerals, including those mined under conditions of near-slavery?

Tiny treasure trove

Once electronic goods go kaput (as they all eventually do), the metals they contain represent a potential "treasure trove," in the words of USGS. By their calculations, the 500 million phones now lying unused in American homes and businesses contain more than 17 million pounds of copper, 6 million ounces of silver, 600,000 ounces of gold, and 250,000 ounces of palladium.

The tin in the 110 pounds of cassiterite a hauler in Congo carries on his shoulders for 40 miles would make enough tiny drops of tin solder to manufacture tens of thousands of cell phones. The incentive to recycle that tin is boosted, of course, by the presence of precious metals lying next to it in the phone. But each device contains only a few cents' worth of any one metal, even the precious ones. And unlike aluminum cans, which are composed of a single, nearly pure metal, electronic goods don't surrender their diminutive, complex array of metals to the recycler without a struggle.

Among the charges that Earthworks levels at ReCellular has been that it ships nonusable phones to countries where hand labor for disassembly is cheap but environmental and workers' rights abuses are commonplace. Dinn says, "You hear horrible stories from Malaysia, Sudan and other countries -- no protective gear for workers handling the toxic materials in the phones, work being done by prisoners."

But Seth Heine, CEO of the phone recycling firm CollectiveGood in Tucker, Ga., says the metals in nonrepairable cell phones are well worth the costs of collection, shipping and processing, and that it can be done responsibly. Because CollectiveGood is "fixated on following absolutely the most environmentally sound procedures," Heine sends cell phones to an Antwerp, Belgium, company whose standards are "higher than anything in the U.S."

There, 17 different metals, including tin, copper, and cobalt, can be reclaimed. But says Heine, "No company's process at this point can reclaim tantalum. That's frustrating, considering its tragic history in the Congo."

On their backs

Reducing demand for coltan, cassiterite, heterogenite and other ores -- by reusing, recycling, and simply not buying so damn many electronic goods so often -- cannot by itself ensure safe jobs and living wages for people in the Congo or anywhere else. But a seemingly insatiable hunger for mineral resources can and does distort economies in some of the planet's most desperate locales. Relieving some of that distortion through reduced consumption at least gives nations and people a chance to build better lives independent of the ups and downs of world commodity exchanges.

Back in North Kivu last year, Channel 4's Jonathan Miller asked some of the people trudging along that muddy trail if they knew what the burdens they carried would be used for. He reported, "Not one of them knew their cassiterite was destined for the electronics industry in the rich world. One man claimed he knew: 'It goes to America,' he said, 'to rebuild the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.'" I don't know whether Miller told that man the real story -- that within only a year or two, much of the tin in the rocks on his shoulders, having served its purpose in the information economy, would end up lying unused in a dresser drawer or trash heap.

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kan.

3 ways to toss an old cell phone
Every day, tens of thousands of toxic cell phones hit the landfill. But there are great alternatives -- including a couple that can save you money.
MSN Money, by Liz Pulliam Weston
September, 2006

Like many of us, Bill Messett had a cell-phone graveyard.

His old phones weren't actually dead, but he certainly wasn't using them. Each was tossed into a drawer, along with all its chargers and accessories, when he upgraded to the next model every year or two.

Messett, 38, had the vague idea that he would use the most recent discarded model as a backup in case he lost his current phone. The rest, he sensed, had some value, which made him reluctant to part with them.

"I'm kind of packratty in that sense," said Messett, a Miami insurance broker. "I don't like to throw anything away."

Messett found his solution this summer while surfing the Internet. He exchanged two of his newer model phones at GreenPhone.com for about $50 in Circuit City gift certificates and donated the rest to GreenPhone's affiliated site, CollectiveGood, in return for a small tax deduction.

What to do with old phones is no small issue. The United States alone has more than 200 million cell phone subscribers, and about 5 million of those change carriers each month, which usually means getting a new phone. Even when they don't change carriers, people often change phones to take advantage of improved technology, innovative features and changing fashions.

"The average user gets a new phone about every 18 months," said James Mosieur, CEO of CellForCash.com, "and they end up retiring the old one."

That's left the United States with hundreds of millions of used cell phones, only a fraction of which have been resold, recycled or reused. Californians, for example, throw away 44,000 cell phones every day.

"Eighty percent have not been repurposed," said Seth Heine, founder and CEO of CollectiveGood/GreenPhone, who estimates there are 750 million used cell phones floating around the United States. "They literally go into people's drawers."

Such cell cemeteries are a problem for a number of reasons:

Environmental concerns. Eventually, owners may get fed up with the clutter and toss their wireless handsets into the nearest trash can -- the worst possible outcome.

Cell phones and chargers contain a variety of toxic materials that can poison the soil, water and air. Cell-phone manufacturers are trying to make new handsets more environmentally friendly, said Joe Farren, public affairs director for CTIA -- The Wireless Association, by phasing out the use of lead and cadmium. Still, you should assume that anything with a circuit board, like a phone or a computer, is a caldron of caustic stuff and try to keep it out of the landfill.

Security concerns. Today's phones can store all kinds of private data, from passwords to e-mails to that racy photo you snapped of your girlfriend. Anyone who gets his or hands on your old phone could potentially access this stuff.

Security is an issue for those who would sell or donate phones, too. Trust Digital, which provides mobile security software, recently said it gleaned data from nine of 10 smart phones and personal digital assistants the company purchased on eBay as an experiment. Among the 27,000 pages of data the company retrieved were e-mails between a married man and his girlfriend, details about pending corporate deals and bank account numbers and passwords, according to The Associated Press.

The kind of simple reset users often perform to erase data doesn't scrub the information from many devices' flash memory, the company said. The information can be reclaimed using software available on the Internet. A user needs to perform "an advanced hard reset," which is typically outlined in the phone's user manual, to permanently clear the memory.

Eroding value. The older the phone, the less it's typically worth. That means fewer shekels in your pocket if you eventually resell and less value to a charity if you decide to donate. If you want the biggest bang for your buck, you should part with an old phone as soon as you get the new one.

CellforCash.com pays anywhere from $5 to $160 for select models, Mosieur said, with the average seller receiving a check for $27. greenphone.com typically offers more for similar models, with sellers receiving points good toward gift certificates at CircuitCity.com, Starbucks, MSN Music and Karmaloop clothing, among other vendors. Recently CellforCash.com offered $67 for a Treo 650, for example, while greenphone.com offered $115. On eBay -- where about 130,000 used phones change hands each month -- a similar model recently went for just under $200.

Another option: Check with your carrier. Wireless providers may offer a discount on a new phone -- typically $25 or so -- when you trade in an older model.

Even if a handset has little cash value, it still can benefit charities. Several posters on the Your Money message board said they donated old phones to battered women's shelters or other nonprofits.

"I donate mine to a domestic violence program," wrote poster jlf. "The phones can be used for not only 911, but the women are also given minutes on the phones so that they can be used as a way to contact or be contacted by assistance agencies."

All four major wireless carriers have recycling programs, as do most sites that buy phones, and you can find other drop-off locations through WirelessRecycling.com. These options typically don't provide receipts for tax deductions, however. If that's important, look for sites like CollectiveGood, which recycles phones for charities and which offers tax documentation.

Before you pass on any cell phone, do the following:

• Discontinue your service. If you stayed with the same company or ported your phone number to a new provider, service to the old phone has almost certainly been disconnected. Otherwise, you should call your old provider and make sure service is turned off.
   
• Do a hard reset on your phone. This may be more complicated than the simple reset often used to erase data when you're having technical problems with the phone. For example, many Treo phones can be reset by pressing a small button on the back, but a hard reset requires pushing four buttons at once. Check your phone's user manual for the procedure. WirelessRecycling.com also offers instructions on its site for common models.
   
• Talk to your company: Some phones, such as the newest ones running Microsoft's mobile software, can be remotely wiped if the phone is lost or stolen. Other third-party software can delete a phone's information if a specially coded e-mail is delivered to it. Talk to your company about what technology it employs to protect its information and what is available.

EPA Green Power Partner:
CollectiveGood goes “carbon neutral” through wind power generated Green Tags:
January 3, 2006

CollectiveGood has once again taken the lead in our industry by becoming the first company to completely off-set our impact on the environment through our use of electricity and cars by buying Green Tags. These are CO2 credits generated through our purchase of enough wind power to offset our electrical use and automotive exhausts, making us “100% carbon neutral” - no one else in the wireless industry does this! It not only makes us cool, but also propels us to the leadership level of the EPA’s Green Power Leadership Club. In addition to supporting use of “renewable energy”, we also recycle the boxes, paper, and packaging that customers send in to us. Our staff is constantly looking for new ways to improve our recycling efforts to create less waste. Just another example of how we are dedicated to preserving the environment not just in theory, but also in actual daily practice.
 

Of Imitators and Innovators
So what’s in a name?

Sometimes life comes at you in curious ways you cannot foresee. Recently, James Mosieur, CEO of RMS Communications and Cell For Cash wrote an article declaring “Collective Good - Cell Phone Recycling Benefits Society”. Of course, we couldn’t agree more! In his article, Mr. Mosieur uses the term “collective good” no less than nine times (see excerpts below) – why this sudden burst of love for our company? Maybe it is spring and love is in the air, or maybe he is actually Green with Envy, not environmentalism. CollectiveGood Mobile Phone Recycling has received lots of love over the years, including enormous amounts of press in almost every magazine and newspaper imaginable. How did CollectiveGood develop such a strong brand? By walking the talk, thinking outside of the box, and setting the highest standards for environmental stewardship in an industry otherwise focused on cutting corners, concealing ugly trade practices, and dumping toxic waste on developing world countries in stunning amounts.

So what has Mr. Mosieur so focused on our Good name? A cynic might think that this is some sort of devious plan to usurp our name, brand, and reputation for his own narrow business purposes by using search engine tactics to divert traffic that would be headed to CollectiveGood’s website – in short perhaps he is trying to steal a little bit of our glory. We choose instead to think that this is just a case of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery—it’s not the first time. Time will tell whether Mr. Mosieur, RMS and the many other imitators are ready and able walk the talk and act as the good environmental and corporate citizens they claim to want to be.

In the meantime, CollectiveGood cell phone recycling and GreenPhone Phone Recycling will continue to shine the path towards environmental stewardship and social responsibility. We welcome other good corporate citizens in making the world a cleaner and better place,