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Cell Phone Recycling (Podcast Transcript)

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Length: 19 minutes

Verena Radulovic: Millions of cell phones will be recycled or thrown away this year. Where will yours end up? Welcome to the EPA’s Plug-In to e-Cycling Podcast, our series that looks at ways to recycle used electronics that are convenient for consumers and good for the environment. The Plug-In to eCycling Program is EPA’s partnership with manufacturers, retailers, and state and local governments to provide consumers with more opportunities to donate or recycle their used products. I’m Verena Radulovic and today we’re here to explore the benefits of recycling cell phones, discuss why more people aren’t recycling them, and what might motivate individuals to do so. Then, look at some easy ways you can recycle your cell phone via existing programs. With me I have Craig Boswell, Vice President of Operations of HOBI International, an electronics recycler in Dallas, and Seth Heine, CEO and President of Collective Goods, an organization that facilitates cell phone donations and recycling.

Verena Radulovic: Thanks very much for joining me.

Craig Boswell: Thanks for having us.

Seth Heine: Thank you.

Verena Radulovic: Let’s get a better sense of what’s out there. We’ve heard different numbers of different kinds of phones, different percentages, the number that we have at EPA is we have 130 million cell phones will be recycled or thrown away this year. And looking at maybe 50 million cell phones being landfilled. And we’ve also heard that less than 20 percent of cell phones are actually recycled. Based on both of your experiences, what would you say the numbers are that are coming back in and the kinds of phones that are being recycled?

Craig Boswell: Well I would say that the 130 million is obviously a hard number to get a 100 percent hold on. It’s probably in the neighborhood based on the amount of subscribers that are out there. And we know, based on what the larger corporations like Seth’s company are doing, that the recycling rate is not to 50 percent that if we’re recycling 30 or 40 million cell phones that’s probably an upper end number on how many are getting recycled. Now, the rest of them it’s hard to determine exactly how many are going into storage because there is very little opportunity cost for the consumer in storage of a small device that is shoving in a drawer or forgetting about it isn’t hard to do versus landfilling it. It’s a hard number to get an exact figure on from our perspective.

Verena Radulovic: And Seth, I think I was talking to you earlier and you said that about roughly 165 million cell phones are sold in the United States each year. Just to talk to what Craig has just spoken about, what would your perspective be?

Seth Heine: Our perspective is that cell phones are pretty ubiquitous these days. There are about 245 million cell phone users in the United States and that’s really out of about 300 million Americans so you can see that it is a very high percentage across the board. The numbers that we see are that about 153 million or so will be retired in the year 2007. That retirement projection is basically based on the fact that you look at the number of subscribers there are and then you figure an 18-month lifespan for the handset and that’s how you arrive at those numbers. But assuming that 30 million are recycled every year, and that’s not an easy number to get at as Craig said so we’ll just assume that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of being correct, but the backlog if you will, the accumulation, of these handsets having piled up for 15 years now and always having been a low recycling rate and so way more, in short, have been put into landfills or drawers which is really where the majority of them goes. The backlog is in fact astonishing; it’s about 900 million used cell phones in this country that have been retired.

Verena Radulovic: We have another statistic here that says, to speak to what Seth just said, that an estimated 49 million cell phones went into reuse or storage in 2005 and Seth as you were talking that number might be low-balling it a bit. But let’s turn it back to Craig for a second.

Craig Boswell: Well, as far as recycling a phone, what Seth indicated is metal reclamation is a big part of that. The phones themselves have a good content percentage of gold. In fact, a cell phone is richer in gold than a gold ore you would mine out of the ground so there is a potential to recover gold, palladium. There’s also a potential now with the newer phones the silver content is increasing as manufacturers shift away from tin lead sodder and go to a silver base sodder. There are two methodologies typically used for recycling the phones, one is sending the phones directly to a smelter in which case that smelter would grind up the phone, melt down the phone, and recover those metals and any hazardous constituents that are in the phone. The second methodology is actually to take the phone apart, de-manufacture the phone. In de-manufacturing the phone you increase your recovery rate a bit because some of the things that would be lost in the smelting process and the shredding of the phone are able to be recovered such as the plastics, and those things go to a reuse or recycling stream. And then some of the other key elements to recycling the phone are getting the accessories, the copper content in the older transformers is actually some of the most recovery you can get in the old phones. So when we look at recycling the phones, we look at everything you would get in the box when you get a new phone: the charger, the headset, the battery. All those things, you know, we want to get in the recycle stream from a resource recovery standpoint. When we’re recovering phones we do get a lot of new phones because the turnover on a phone is about 18 months.

Verena Radulovic: So let’s talk about the difference between reuse, refurbishment, and recycling because I think when we talk about recycling cell phones there’s a lot of different things that can happen to that phone on the back end—sometimes it’ll go for donation, sometimes it will be refurbished and sold onto secondary market, sometimes the materials will be picked apart—and so I think for those listening, when we hear about recycling programs maybe Seth you could clarify what the typical definitions are for reuse, refurbishment, and recycling.

Seth Heine: That’s a great question, sort of taking it from the easiest to the hardest, reuse is pretty simple and straightforward. Obviously, the device and/or batteries, and/or accessories were reused just like it sounds. Very rarely does that reuse just sort of occur with a quick little shine on the phone if you will, normally that requires that the phone be tested, run through a variety of testing protocols and the data has to be pulled out, oftentimes the plastic has to be reconditioned or repainted or replaced. So when you start dealing with those sort of processes and phases you’re sort of speaking to some degree of the refurbishing process. And then the recycling process, just as Craig was saying, can also be pretty multi-faceted in that the recycling can mean that you can just grind up the phone and take it straight to materials reclamation which is what we do when we get the famous brick phone as they’re called, those putty-colored Motorola phones that used to cost $2,000 a decade ago if anyone can remember that far back in these things. But more often than not, lots of organizations, including our own and including Craig’s, most reputable corporations have some degree of breaking the phone down, again to various components where you can reuse the LCDs or the touch pads or in many cases the memory can be inter-compatible or some of the processing chips are. So you want to take those things out in the cases of the newer phones and then you can ultimately take whatever is left and then run that through the same materials reclamation process and in fact you’ll end up with the same metals.

Verena Radulovic: Craig, do you have some thoughts on that?

Craig Boswell: The highest level, and from an environmental standpoint, what we can do is eliminate the need to create a new phone. That’ll eliminate the need to mine new materials, to go through a manufacturing process, and there are markets for the used phones that are viable that allow us to put those phones directly back into an active reuse environment.

Verena Radulovic: Now when we talk about why it is important to recycle your phone, we’re looking at the environmental benefits first. And to speak to what both of you said, EPA has calculator that we developed. Really it’s to support what we’ll talk about in another Podcast which is the EPEAT Tool, it’s assessing greener computers but it can also be transferred to other devices, and that tool, which we have on our Web site, www.epa.gov\plugin, you can calculate the energy savings and the greenhouse gas benefits of the upstream lifecycle savings by reusing and recycling your cell phone. And just some of the neat little statistics we have are that if you recycle a million cell phones, so that’s if you kind of break it down to the most elemental level, you have greenhouse gas savings that are equal to driving over 1,000 cars a year. And then I think when we speak about the materials side, there’s a US geological study that was done last year, it’s called Recycle Cell Phones: A Treasure Trove of Valuable Materials, they look at it and say that if all these 1 million cell phones are recycled, nearly 4 metric tons of gold could be recovered and that’s over 3 million metric tons of rock that would not have to be mined to recover that gold. So speaking to both Craig and Seth, to what you had both spoken to earlier, I think it puts a little more meat to why it is important to recycle your cell phone or to reuse it. And with this particular calculator, the reuse benefits are even higher.

Craig Boswell: Well, a couple of advantages recycling cell phones has and the overall electronics recycling markets, one of the advantages it has is the unit itself is small so you’re not putting a burden logistically, from a transportation standpoint, there’s a number of ways that you can get your cell phone back to an organization that will recycle. And from that standpoint, you know, we’re not looking at a situation where the harm done from transporting an item to a recycling center might be worse than actually to benefit from recycling it. And then when you look at the phones themselves, because of the transportation burden is small and the cost of transporting can be kept low, and you look at the potential for reuse, you can have a situation where the program itself will pay for itself, which obviously is a tremendous advantage in the marketplace. Because we’re not looking at a situation like we do in other electronics items, possibly some of the CRT recycling programs, where you’re trying to find somebody that would have to pay for the program for recycling. In this case you can have the program itself self-funding. The more you include reuse in that program, the more self-funding potential you have, The values of the phones can be well in excess of $100 on the reuse market and even some of the older phones will still carry $10 or $20 worth of value. So that helps offset the cost that might be incurred in collecting and processing the phones and erasing the data that’s on the phone. And then even as you go down to material recovery, because of the precious metal content, there is material recovery value in recycling the phone. Now the phones are very light even though the concentration is large, there’s just not a lot of it there. But in large volumes, when you’re talking a million, 2 million, 4 million phones you start to get some significant material recovery value. A program that is carefully designed and looks at the opportunities for reuse can be a self-funding program which becomes a win-win situation both doing a benefit to the environment and we’re creating a surplus of funds that can have a number of different opportunities to use.

Verena Radulovic: But just when I think of it, some of our Plug-In to e-Cycling partners—you have AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Office Depot, Staples, Best Buy, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, LG Samsung—these are major companies that have programs and they are also supporting charitable initiatives which I think is what may potentially appeal to some folks that may not necessarily have the environment at the forefront of their concerns… So then why aren’t people recycling their cell phones?

Craig Boswell: Well thanks for that question. Given the fact that we work with 500 charities and have thousands of drop-off points, we ask ourselves all the time. How come most of the phones are still ending up in a drawer or in a garbage can? In fact, in my mind the drawer and the garbage can are sort of working in cahoots with one another. There’s just this, I don’t know what else to call it it’s just a little bit of an ignorance factor. I don’t think that people choose to put phones in a drawer and let it pile up and I certainly don’t think people want to throw away phones knowing what’s in them. The impact of that, I think it’s just that, you know the manufacturers have been challenged in getting the word out to the population because many times this may be news to the listeners but oftentimes the manufacturer of the phone doesn’t necessarily get to choose what went in the box when you bought it. The carrier is in control of that. You know the communications or the motivation to ultimately manage an effective take back or recycling program that sort of slips through the cracks. It’s one of those things where you just kind of have to do it once and then you know how easy it is and then you probably remember it moving forward. Because there’s many, if you actually look around, there’s actually many locations, but in fact you don’t even need to get in your car and drive to a brick and mortar location. Most of this stuff is actually Web-based and free shipping labels are available right through the Web where you just download it and print it and send it all in. The sort of unfortunate part of it is that it’ll be another 18 months before you recycle your phone and you may be little challenged in trying to remember what did I do with the last one? It’s not like a tin can or a newspaper where you recycle them frequently and you’re always reminded of how easy that was and where to do it. You kind of have to remind yourself a little bit in that case. I think in many cases we look at the 18 month lifespan and think of that as being a short lifespan for a product but in fact it’s a long lifespan to have to remind yourself what did I do with the last one?

Verena Radulovic: Craig, what do you think motivates consumers to recycle their cell phone or maybe lack thereof?

Craig Boswell: There are some consumers that, you know, it concerns especially as the devices get more and more complex and more and more data is on there and they’re starting to think of them more like they might a computer where might I have something on there that from a customer privacy standpoint that I don’t want to get out? And again, you know, these programs the reputable providers are addressing those issues. And, you know, there’s the same types of data protection provided for cell phones as there are for computers and these larger programs that we’ve found.

If you turn in a phone that is not erasable either due to the physical condition of the phone where there’s something broken on it or the electronic condition of the phone that’s when those phones then go into recycling. And in the recycling process, the data storage devices are destroyed so that there’s no availability for anybody to recover that data.

Verena Radulovic: Why don’t we come to discuss of what consumers can actually do?

Seth Heine: Absolutely. Again, Collective Good programs support programs in every Staples in North America—maybe there’s people from Canada listening in on this—but the programs in Staples in the United States support the Sierra Club, the programs in Staples in Canada support the Special Olympics. We’re also in every FedEx Kinko’s store in the United States. That’s roughly 1,400 locations. We’re in lots of the sort of, you know, one office locations in association with the 500 charities we work with. But the easiest way to participate in the Collective Good programs if you don’t happen to be near a Staples or a FedEx Kinko’s is to just go to a CollectiveGood.com. There are 500 charities or so to be supported there. Since 500 tends to be a little overwhelming you can actually sort it by States or you can sort of sort is by cause depending on what kind of cause you’re wanting to support. And then an additional form of motivation is the GreenFound.com site. Again where any phone and all of its related accessories such as batteries or chargers can also be sent in. And that site will tell you very specifically what your old phone is worth, assuming it’s in reasonable shape, and provides you a free shipping label to get those phones in. And as you mentioned, there’s almost any place that actually sold you the phone usually has a cell phone recycling program, too. You’re not going to get value necessarily for it. You may or may not be able to get a tax reduction that way depending on how it’s been set up, but there’s lots of locations along those lines as well.

Craig Boswell: We would really encourage people, there’s lots and lots of drop off locations, but also there’s lots of opportunities on the Web. I mean, we offer recycling through our Web site at www.hobi.com. We also encourage people to, you know, look at everything they had with that phone and make sure that they include that in their drop off or their mail or wherever they’re sending the phone—the battery, there’s cobalt to be recovered in the battery. As I mentioned before, there’s copper to be recovered in the chargers and the ear buds. It’s an opportunity for us to recover those resources and most of the programs will gladly accept those other additional items.

Verena Radulovic: Thanks very much Seth and Craig for joining me today. With me I have Craig Boswell, Vice President of Operations of HOBI International, an electronics recycler in Dallas, and Seth Heine, CEO and President of Collective Good, an organization that facilitates cell phone donations and recycling.

Today we discussed the benefits of recycling cell phones, why more people aren’t recycling them, and what could motivate individuals to do so. We also looked at some easy ways you can recycle your cell phone every day.

So go to www.epa.gov/plugin, and recycle your cell phone. It’s an easy call

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