In May this year at the EU . . . → Read More: Brussels says use less, and use it again]]> The word ‘green’ has taken on a new and much wider meaning with the ever-increasing use of ever-decreasing natural resources.  Recycling is no longer a polite suggestion; it has become a requirement if we expect to continue with the lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to, at least in the ‘developed’ world.

In May this year at the EU Green Week Conference in Brussels, the call to “use less, and use it again” was loud and clear.

Just one of the many examples brought up at the conference was the necessity of recycling electronic equipment including mobile phones.  Every time a new device appears on the market, it becomes a must-have for everyone who owns the previous latest device –“ keeping up with the Jones” it used to be called.  Right now, the introduction of the Apple iPhone 4S is a case in point.  Everyone wants the new one, so everyone needs to recycle the old one.

According to a Nokia survey, only about nine percent of mobile phone users are currently taking advantage of an increasing number of recycling services.  The fact is that you can get money for that old iPhone (and all sorts of other electronics) as you make your own contribution to a greener environment and the conservation of the planet’s resources.

The European Environment Commissioner, Janez Potocnik, has said that recycling is simply good common sense.  He observed that the average mobile phone contains numerous non-renewable elements such as gold, platinum, copper and palladium.  If all those phones were recycled, not only would the materials be there for re-use, but the business of recycling would create a lot of jobs.  It’s a win-win situation for everyone.

There are several reasons for that nine percent figure from the Nokia survey.  Some people want to keep the old phone or other device as a back-up, but that’s only a small percentage of the 91 percent.

Most people just aren’t aware of the options available, or the fact that they can actually get paid to recycle their electronics.  There are many websites available where you can compare prices paid for used iPhones, iPads, cds etc.

All you need to do is type in ‘mobile phone recycling’ and you’ll come up with sites like www.comparemobilephonerecycling.co.uk and get all the information on where to go and what prices are paid by different recycling companies.  You should remove all personal information that may be stored in your phone or other device; one random sampling reported that as many as 99% of devices turned in for recycling still contained personal data of some sort.

Tossing your unwanted, outdated electronics in the trash bin is an absolute no-no as far as the environment is concerned; not only are precious metals wasted, but disposing of plastic and chemicals in landfills or by burning pollutes the ground and the air.  If that doesn’t faze you, remember that you’re also throwing money away.

Mobile phone company Sony Ericsson will unveil two “green” handsets tomorrow with a carbon footprint 15% lower than current models. By cutting packaging, using recycled plastics and reducing the use of solvents in the paints, the . . . → Read More: New environmentally friendly phones]]> Recycled plastics and reductions in packaging and manufacturing solvents make handsets more environmentally friendly, says a leading manufacturer of mobile phones.

Mobile phone company Sony Ericsson will unveil two “green” handsets tomorrow with a carbon footprint 15% lower than current models. By cutting packaging, using recycled plastics and reducing the use of solvents in the paints, the electronics company claims to have made the handsets more environmentally friendly.

The new phones, the C901 GreenHeart and the Naite, are part of what Sony Ericsson says will be a revised portfolio of environmentally friendly phones to be rolled out in the next two years. It is also part of the company’s wider mission to cut 20% of its total carbon emissions by 2015.

“Sony Ericsson has worked continuously to become an industry leader in the area of removing harmful substances from the core of its phones and in creating industry leading energy efficiency chargers,” said Dick Komiyama, president of Sony Ericsson. .”

Sony Ericsson sells around 100m phones a year globally and wants to have a series of green improvements in all its phones by the end of 2011. More than 31m phones were bought in the UK in 2008.

Most of the CO2 reductions in the two new handsets come from a significant reduction in the amount of paper that comes with the phone. The packaging is smaller and the user manual has been replaced with an electronic version contained on the phone itself.

“The major benefit to the environment is the reduction of paper weight in transportation,” said Mats Pellback-Scharp, head of the corporate sustainability office at Sony Ericsson. “Compared to the same product from the year before, we save 90% of the paper shipped to each customer. That’s 3kg of CO2, 15% of the carbon footprint of the complete phone.”

For older phones from the company, the box and manual weighed in at 550g. This has been reduced now to 42g and means that in 1m phones, Sony Ericsson will save 350 tonnes of paper, around 13,000 trees or 7,500 cubic metres of wood.

Inside the box, there are no plastic bags to wrap the various components and 80% of the hard plastics used on the phone are recycled. The company has also halved the amount of solvents needed for the paints by using water-soluble inks.

Gerrard Fisher, programme manager for sustainable products at the Waste & Resources Action Programme (Wrap) said: “This is an encouraging development and we are seeing an exciting new trend in the mobile phone market, with Nokia’s Evolve phone and many Motorola phones also incorporating recycled plastics. We welcome the introduction and promotion of hi-tech products with recycled content in the marketplace. It is good news that companies are considering the development of life cycle impacts, as well as promoting innovation that reduces the environmental impact of product packaging.”

He added that Wrap was about to start work assessing the life cycles of mobile phones, to help identify areas where the impacts of these products could be reduced.

The new C901 will be released later this month and the Naite will come out in September. The latter phone will also come with a new low-power charger that operates at 30 milliwatts (mW), where currently the chargers are rated at 100mW.

Overall, Sony Ericsson also announced a commitment to reduce the company’s carbon footprint by 20% by 2015. By the same date, it will also reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by 15% from the full life cycle of its products, including mining, production and use by consumers.

The company also wants to increase its recycling scheme which takes used phones from consumers for use in recycling. It wants to collect one million phones every year from 2011.

Iza Kruszewska, toxics campaigner at Greenpeace UK welcomed the new phones from Sony Ericsson and said that the company had a good record in reducing its use of harmful chemicals. She also said however that the company should increase the number of its recycling points around the world. “They do mention their ambition to increase the number of collection points and take-back schemes they have globally but they are well behind Nokia on this.”

The company maintain they will settle your account by providing . . . → Read More: New phone recycling system in place]]> A noted United Kingdom online mobile phone recycling company, Mobilephonerecycling.com, has recently started a faster and more efficient recycling service for the consumer. The service will not only provide the seller with some extra cash but will help the environment by limiting the number of discarded phones.

The company maintain they will settle your account by providing your cash within a week, and the seller will merely need to follow the directions on the company’s website. The company will give a quotation for the purchase of the phone and should the seller accept the quotation he is then provided with a freepost envelope. The seller will then post the phone to the company in the usual way.

According to the company, the seller will have the agreed amount in his hands within one week and he will be secure in the knowledge he has done his bit for the environment. A search bar will shortly be introduced to enable sellers to compare different recycling companies in addition to finding the best price for their used mobile phone.

Due to the ever increasing popularity of the latest mobile phones, consumers are continually seeking to upgrade to a more superior phone, resulting in many used and unwanted phones being discarded. In a 2009 statistics report, barely 7% of unused mobile phones in the country are recycled. Mobile phone users in this country replace their phones every 16 to 18 months resulting in nearly 26 million new phones coming on stream.

Mobile phone batteries are toxic and contain such materials as mercury and lead. These have a detrimental effect on the fertility of soil and are harmful to human beings and animals as well as the general environment. Quantities of these chemicals never dissipate. It is therefore important that a mobile phone is disposed of in the correct manner.

By making use of the recycling companies the mobile phone user is not only assisting in the continual fight against pollution but he is helping his fellow man. Having just a little extra cash will allow the user a far greater choice of mobile phones and perhaps he can even choose a new phone that would have been well out of his price range had he not recycled.

Even your really old phone has a resale value; it could be as low as . . . → Read More: Money for Christmas, mobile phone recycling]]> If you need some extra spending money for Christmas, you might want to consider recycling your old mobile phone.  A recent study reveals that the average UK household has over £700 worth of old phones sitting around in drawers and on desktops.

Even your really old phone has a resale value; it could be as low as £1 or as high as £390, depending on the telephone.  Smartphones, of course, have the highest resale value and the older you go, the lower the value becomes.

Many families have some recently traded smartphones sitting around the house gathering dust when they could be yielding currency instead.  The simple truth is that not nearly enough people think about recycling their phones, even if they are not all that old.

As a matter of course, most service providers are only interested in getting you on network with a new phone.  They don’t care what you do with old one and can’t be troubled with bothering to recycle them, even though it would be a worthwhile secondary stream of income.

This leaves the consumer to do it themselves, which is easy.  Just get online and type in “mobile phone recycling” and start considering your options.

This information has excited the folks at O2 . . . → Read More: O2 Recycle, proving popular with phone users]]> O2 Recycle, the plan that persuades customers who want an upgrade or are just joining the O2 network to recycle their handsets in exchange for cash has been taking off at an amazing rate.  Right now, as many as 66% of UK mobile phone users recycle their old phones.

This information has excited the folks at O2 so much that they are now offering to donate all profits from their recycling program to the youth charity, Think Big.  Previously, the company donated just a single pound for each phone turned in as part of the programme.

Instead of sending recycled phones to the landfill, O2 reprocesses and repairs as many phones as it can for sale in the global marketplace.  Any unusable units and waste residue is shipped for recycling.

Insiders warn that phone recycling is becoming such a popular market that unscrupulous business people are working their way in and they encourage consumers to check and make certain that any handsets they give up for recycling are being handled responsibly, ethically, and in an environmentally sound manner.

The company will be revealing two new ‘green’ handsets that have a carbon footprint offset lower then other current mobiles phones by up to 15 percent. To achieve this Sony Ericsson are . . . → Read More: Sony Ericsson using more recycled plastics in phones]]> It is being reported by a mobile phone manufacturer, Sony Ericsson that using recycled plastics and reduced packaging are making mobile phone handsets environmentally friendly.

The company will be revealing two new ‘green’ handsets that have a carbon footprint offset lower then other current mobiles phones by up to 15 percent. To achieve this Sony Ericsson are reducing packaging, using recycled plastics and using paint that have reduced solvents.

The C901 Greenheart and Naite are part of Sony Ericssons portfolio of environmentally phones that are due to be released in the coming years. With the release of these two phones the company is hoping to reduce their total carbon emissions by 20% by 2015.

Globally Sony Ericsson sells approximately 100 million phones each year and the company is hoping that by 2011 all of their phones will have ‘green’ improvements. By reducing the amount of paper used in the phones manuals and packaging, Sony Ericsson is able to report a reduction of CO2 gases. Older models of Sony Ericsson phones and their packaging weighed upwards of 550g. With the new ‘green’ model phones and smaller paper manuals the average weight of packaging the phones is now 42g, meaning that the company has saved 350 tonnes of paper.

Sony Ericsson is using water soluble inks therefore halving the amount of solvents used in the production of phones and packaging. The phones are no longer wrapped in plastic when packaged and 80% of the hard plastic phone parts are recycled.

Sony Ericsson is committed to reducing their carbon footprint by 15% by 2015 and also reduces the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that their factories release by the same date. Sony Ericsson are also creating a recycling process in which consumers of their phones are able to return their old phones back to the company where they will be recycled, they are hoping to collect one million phones each year.

The website also provides browsers with plenty of . . . → Read More: Boots now recycling mobiles]]> High street chemists, Boots, are now taking mobiles as a way to promote recycling among consumers.  Boots is offering those interested a simple way to trade in old mobiles, since you can simply head over to their website, enter the phone model, and then see what your options are.

The website also provides browsers with plenty of useful tips such as how you can recycle other electrical items that previously may have never even crossed your mind as reusable.  Of course, there are plenty of online mobile recycling websites that will mail you an envelope to return a mobile in, but Boots allows you to simply walk into one of their hundreds of stores and grab your own envelope so that it gets off on its way much quicker.

The only downside is that there is not any hard cash offers for an old mobile, but anytime that you choose to sell Boots a mobile you receive points that will continue to build up on the company’s Advantage Card and after thirty days have passed you can trade them in for items such as cosmetics, toiletries, food, and many other products at any Boots stores.

Outside of mobile phones, Boots will also take trade-ins for digital cameras, printer cartridges, MP3 players, and several other electrical items all of which count of advantage points.  Within a six month period households are allowed to trade in up to six devices so you can wait and add up points for even better treats at the store.

However, there are mobile phone . . . → Read More: Mobile Phone Recycling]]> Although it may be something that you never have thought of before, proper disposal of cell phones is a major issue due to the fact that with so many free sim cards, free mobile phone offers, and free chargers included in every contract millions of people produce mountains of mobile phone waste.

However, there are mobile phone recycling centres and plans that can offer an alternative to producing waste every time you upgrade a mobile phone, which is an excellent eco-friendly choice as opposed to adding to overflowing landfills.

One of the best reasons to consider recycling old mobile phone components is because they contain many toxic chemicals that can seep into ground and contaminate both the soil and water sources.

Mobile phones often contain mercury, which can be very harmful to the environment when thrown away.  In addition, mobile phones and their components are also usually made of non-biodegradable elements that will take up previous landfill space forever.

Thus, the simple choice to protect the environment and help do your part in the green movement is simply to look for a mobile phone recycling centre at a shop, or online, before tossing away an older model.

Outside of making the ‘green’ choice, there are other incentives for choosing to recycle an old mobile phone as well.  For instance, some mobile providers or mobile manufacturers will offer you discounts on future purchases or cash if you drop your phone off for recycling purposes.

They are able to offer these perks because sometimes old mobile phones contain components that can be placed into refurbished models.  Other collection agencies will take old models and donate them to charities for you, helping to provide mobile phones to those who live in under-developed countries, those displaced by natural disasters, or members of the military.

There are many different organizations that offer mobile phone recycling opportunities for you to take advantage of.  Almost all of the major mobile phone providers and manufacturers offer some type of recycling facilities, which is the easiest way to seek out a location, although these usually will not offer any type of perk.

In addition, there are also online organizations and drop off centres that offer cash or discounts.  Online you can also seek out donation locations or donation kits if you wish to donate your phone to a charity.