Did you know that only 10% of over 50 million cell phones purchased every year in the United Kingdom get to the recycle phase? What happens to the rest?
Majority of them are occupants of dark corners in our drawers and closets of home and office.
The rest either go to the bins, garbage dumps, and landfills only to pollute the ecology while adding no commercial to value.
Is yours one of them? Does the thought to recycle my Samsung Galaxy S8 for cash not strike you even once?
Well, to recycle old mobile phones is a habit beneficial both for the pocket and the environment.
Openly discarded phones jeopardize biodiversity, causing lasting damage to soils, and adversely affect both human and animal health.
Why is it so? Where is the root cause of this problem?
Let’s have a quick look at why mobile phone recycling is the answer to curb mobile e-waste.
Mobile Phone Production Adds Incredibly to Pollution:
An alarming fact – 80% of the CO2 released during the lifespan of a mobile phone are emitted during its production.
That’s not all. Cell phones consist of
- 50% of plastic
- 15% of copper
- 15% of glass
- 4% of cobalt
Rest is metal by-products (Gold, Silver, Mercury, Lead, and other potentially harmful substances)
Electronic components, batteries, and screens are made of over 70 minerals and a quarter of it comes from illegal mining. One phone battery can contaminate more than half a million litres of water.
When you opt to recycle your old phone, you facilitate your phone’s waste to be reused as the raw material for other phones and thereby helping to manage the toxicity in an effective way.
How Does Recycling Your Old Phone Work?
If the phone is in working condition and could be repaired for either aesthetically or functionally, it goes through the process of refurbishing to be reintroduced in the used phone market. However, if it is kaput and has reached its end-of-life, it is further sent to the recycling companies for deconstruction and extraction of everything that could be reused. That means your new phone could consist of elements that are extracted from any other device. Crazy, right?
However, not to worry because the reusable stuff goes through a thorough and stringent refurbishment process that crushes and melts these to make them as good as the new. Primarily the bulk of metals and minerals extracted go through the furnace and are redone for its renewal.
The process enables the production of the raw material that will go into the manufacturing of new phones while conserving the natural resources, reducing the landfills pressure and creating new employment opportunities.
Reselling Your Smartphone Enables Recycling
When you decide to sell your Samsung Galaxy S8, you’ve in a way done your bit towards the recycling process. You’ve moved your phone to the right place where it will continue its journey. That’s the most you could have done.
The reselling phone market is huge and offers varied options and marketplaces to trade-in your smartphone. There are B2B and B2C online markets that serve different business models. You can directly get end customers in B2C marketplaces like eBay and Facebook Marketplaces. Even there are businesses who exclusively deal in broken phones.
So, either your phone is working or not, is intact or broken, or looks good or not, it has a market, customer, and a value that you should definitely leverage.
Look For a Responsible Recycler
Presumably, the majority of the recycling companies do their job rightly and disassemble the phone in a structured manner. However, there have been cases where the recycle companies have not been responsible enough for the e-waste that they generate. A study from Basel Action Network suggests that a huge chunk of these e-waste is shipped to the toxic waste dumps of other countries.
The study further suggests that about 80% of it goes to China, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Vietnam where people are exposed to and work in hazardousness environments only to suffer serious consequences.
If you are an environmental enthusiast and are concerned about your responsibility towards mother earth, you’ll not like to go with such a company. So, being wary of the recycler’s e-waste policies also helps to ensure that your phone is moving in the right direction.
If you are reading this, chances are you have better clarity now on why and how to get your Samsung Galaxy S8 recycled.
Waste isn’t waste until we waste it.
