The Journal News – Recycling cell phones isn’t just right thing to do — it’s the law
Recycling cell phones isn’t just right thing to do — it’s the law
By NOREEN O’DONNELL
JOURNAL NEWS COLUMNIST
(Original publication: May 27, 2006)
I have a few generations of cell phones in my top dresser drawer.
There’s the flat, black one, labeled with the name of a telephone company that no longer exists, looking vaguely like a calculator. So sleek when I got it, so clunky now.
The next one is smaller but still upright. No flip action and just a bit too long to fit comfortably in my jeans pocket. So light, I thought then. So heavy now.
It’s the evolution of cell phones. I kept mine because I didn’t know what to do with them. I still don’t know what I’m going to do, but Westchester County is about to make it illegal to throw them in the trash. As of Thursday, you’ll risk first a warning, then fines of up to $250.
California put a similar ban into effect in February. New York City follows next year, though the city’s law doesn’t stop with fines. It threatens jail time for repeat offenders.
The goal is to safeguard the toxic materials found in the phones and their batteries. Arsenic, for example, and antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, lead, nickel and zinc. If the phones end up in landfills, the chemicals and metals can leach into the soil or the groundwater. If they’re incinerated, they can form other toxic materials.
Lots of people are too environmentally aware to even think of throwing away their cell phones. They already recycle them or donate them to domestic-violence shelters or other worthwhile causes.
If they wanted, they could leave them at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., the next time they visit. The zoo takes them because their components are coated with coltan, or columbite-tantalite. The rare metallic ore is mined in the forests of central Africa’s Democratic Republic of Congo, home to mountain gorillas and endangered lowland.
The mining is destroying the gorillas’ habitat and making the animals vulnerable to poachers; reducing the demand for coltan could help save the gorillas.
But most people seem to have few qualms about how they get rid of their phones. Fewer than 1 percent of the phones discarded between 1999 and early 2003 were collected by cell-phone collection programs, according to a study done by INFORM Inc., a nonprofit research organization based in New York City. That figure is inching up but still is only about 10 percent, says Eric A. Goldstein, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“These days with new features being added all the time, they’re almost thought of as a disposable commodity, not a durable good that you would keep,” he said.
In 1985, there were 340,000 cell-phone subscribers in the United States. Today there are as many as 200 million, talking, texting, taking pictures and, on average, tossing the phones after a mere 18 months. Why hold on to your old one when you could have a Motorola Q from Verizon, an ultra thin “smartphone,” fully loaded with access to a high-speed wireless broadband network and a high-resolution video camera?
For their size, cell phones are packed with poison. And e-waste — the cell phones, televisions, computers, video games, VCRs and DVD players, and fax and copy machines that Americans discard by the millions — makes up the fastest growing category of waste in the United States. Various reports put electronic waste at less than 4 percent of the total solid-waste stream, but it’s growing two or three times faster than any other category, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Requiring cell phones to be recycled is a good first step, Goldstein says, but ideally manufacturers should have to take back their cell phones, computers and other electronic must-haves as they do in Europe and Japan. Then they have an incentive to redesign their goods to eliminate some of the toxic materials.
As Westchester bans cell phones from the trash, its Department of Environmental Facilities has certified 57 places that will take them for recycling, from government offices to cell-phone stores.
A list is available at www.westchestergov.com/cellphone or by calling 914-813-5420.
Of course, you can always let them pile up in a drawer instead. That, it turns out, isn’t such a silly thing to do. If recycling is done properly, it can be a good choice, but not if the cell phones are being sent overseas, where regulations are few.
“It risks exporting the toxic problem to developing countries,” Goldstein says.
