Here is a number we didn’t want to see… In Australia only three percent of discarded mobile phones ended up being recycled last year. And with 8.7 million phones being shipped to the land down under that’s a lot of handsets that could be ending up in landfills, as the average user is upgrading their phones every 18 months to two years. According to recently released figures from the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association the proportion of phones being recycled is actually falling! The group is now calling on governments world wide to make the mobile industry more accountable for collecting unwanted phones.
However, the association research did indicate that many consumers are keeping old phones as a backup or spare. And as someone who had an old drawer of phones knows, there are also programs where phones can be donated to those in need.