Legislation May Spur More Cell Phone Recycling
WASHINGTON, Dec. 13, – Many Americans have a partner they spend most of the day with. The partner helps them take care of business, coordinate plans and keep tabs on their kids. But despite this communication companion’s loyal service, most Americans bury it in the closet after about a year and a half, only to make a more sophisticated acquaintance.
Cell phones have seemingly become a necessity in today’s society. Wireless subscribers in the United States have climbed from 350,000 in 1985 to almost 175 million.
The number of subscribers, combined with the short life of the phones, means that almost 130 million phones are retired annually in this country. Although some of these phones end up in the trash, which can create environmental hazards, most people choose to store them away, which has created a stockpile of some 500 million phones in the closets, drawers and basements of America, according Inform Inc., an environmental research organization.
Nearly all major wireless industry service providers and phone manufacturers have established voluntary end-of-life collection programs, ranging from mail-in to collection bins in their stores.
A common trend in industry collection programs, especially with service providers, is for proceeds from recycling and sales of refurbished phone to go to charities established by the companies. Two of the largest collection charities are Verizon’s HopeLine program benefiting victims of domestic abuse and Donate a Phone, operated by The Wireless Foundation, a non-profit industry organization working with most major wireless companies that raises funds for a variety of charities.
To a smaller extent, independent charities also collect phones.
In addition, independent phone recyclers such as Michigan-based ReCellular, the largest U.S. phone refurbisher and recycler, also accepts phone donations by mail.
ReCellular, which works with a majority of industry collection programs and charities, receives about half its phones for free from independent and wireless industry charity collections, with a portion of the profit from reselling or recycling the equipment returning to those charities, according to ReCellular marketing manager Mike Newman.
The other half are phones returned by customers to phone service providers and manufacturers. Newman said depending on quality, which varies widely, ReCellular will pay about $3 or $4 for a phone that can be refurbished and resold.
ReCellular sells the used phones for $7 to $8 to domestic retailers and service providers in Latin America.
Phones that can’t be refurbished and resold, which account for around 30 percent of phones that come in, are sold to companies that harvest them for raw materials and properly dispose of the waste. Cell phones contain some toxic plastics and metals, namely lead used in solder, that if dumped in a landfill can leach into ground water or release hazardous materials when burned.
The revenues generated from selling unusable equipment are usually offset by handling costs, and “we probably break even at best,” Newman said. And ReCellular usually has to pay to have some plastics and phone batteries recycled.
The reuse market is certainly the money maker for ReCellular and similar businesses, providing nearly all their profit. Last year ReCellular took in about 4 million phones and had revenue of more than $40 million.
ReCellular has been in business for 14 years, and Newman said incoming collections are expanding but still have great potential for growth: businesses like ReCellular currently collect only three to five percent of the phones retired a year. “It’s not a lot.. There are a lot of phones out there that nobody is collecting and nobody is recycling.”
Newman said he attributes this to lack of public awareness of phone collection programs. There are some 40,000 drop-off locations in the United States, and “you can recycle your phone without too much effort,” he said. “But you have to know that you can do it and you have to be motivated to do it, and that to me is the biggest hurdle right now.”
Wireless industry companies don’t mention their collection programs in their numerous advertisements. “They really haven’t broadly publicized it,” said Bette Fishbein, author of “Waste in the Wireless World” and senior fellow at Inform Inc., a non-profit research organization aimed at solving environmental problems.
“I see a real problem in voluntary programs.” Fishbein said. “You’ve got to have targets and you’ve got to have reporting and you’ve got to have some consequences if you don’t meet these targets.”
Fishbein also said that companies must be stakeholders in their products at the end of their useful lives. This will give the companies incentives to make a more easily recyclable product and ensure that it is collected.
Fishbein said the trend of wireless companies’ contributing the proceeds from recycling phones to charity is very unusual in the recycling business. “Why, if it’s profitable, they don’t take a lot more back isn’t 100 percent clear,” she said. Part of the reason may be because more phones may saturate the reuse market and decrease the value of used phones, she said.
Marcia Simon, a spokeswoman for Verizon’s New England region, said every Verizon store collects phones but the company doesn’t plan to get into for-profit recycling. “There are so many areas to focus on strategically when you’re looking at where you’re going to draw your profit from. I think [Verizon] is just focused on other areas.” Verizon Wireless has collected phones for charitable causes since the mid-1990s, and HopeLine and related recycling programs run by Verizon have collected more than 2 million used phones since 1995, netting $7.9 million in the last three years for victims of domestic abuse. The company’s collection program continues to grow as people slowly learn about it and more people upgrade to newer phones, Simon said.
Despite some criticism of the wireless industry on recycling issues, Newman said that “the industry is waking up to the need to take it more seriously.” Both he and Fishbein see European and domestic legislation as an engine driving more recycling.
The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, drafted by the European Union, went into effect this fall. Producers of electronic equipment must finance the collection, treatment, recovery and disposal of electronic waste. The program will impose the requirements along a sliding scale, and by 2007 producers will have to meet strict targets for recycling electronic waste or face penalties.
Just because companies are required to take back products in Europe doesn’t mean they will voluntarily do it in the United States, Fishbein said. But the directive could influence legislation in this country, she said, probably first at the state level.
The Restriction of Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, also established by the European Union, will require products made after July 2006 to be free of many hazardous substances, including lead, mercury and cadmium, that are found in cell phones.
“The RoHs Directive is probably going to impact how electronic equipment is made around the world,” Fishbein said. Phones and electronic equipment are designed to be sold in the global market, and producers don’t want to produce two types of products, she said.
The California Cell Phone Recycling Act, signed into law in late September, is the first of its kind in the United States. It requires cell phone merchants to establish collection systems for used phones.
A take-back law being just in California can make a difference, Fishbein said. If just three or four states pass legislation, the wireless industry will respond because it doesn’t want to deal with different laws in every state, she said.
“Over the past few years we have looked at different programs that may increase the number of cell phones that we are able to collect,” said Craig Liska, corporate director of the international environment, health and safety department at Motorola., a leading manufacturer of cell phones. While some of these programs have had mild success, Liska said, he is aware that most end-of-life phones do not make it to recyclers.
Motorola is experimenting with a new take-back program in which consumers can mail in old phones by printing a prepaid label found on Motorola’s Web site.
Liska said Motorola also has been active in refining phone design to reduce weight, incorporate environmental considerations and increase energy efficiency. In the late 1990s Motorola stopped using nickel-cadmium batteries, which pose an environmental risk because of their cadmium content.
“We are currently working on designing new products that will not contain lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium VI and brominated flame retardants that are being banned in Europe in 2006,” Liska said.
Motorola continues to look for opportunities to reduce the different types of plastics used in its products, said Juli Burda, a company spokeswoman. “By reducing the number of plastics, we may assist in the recyclers’ efforts to produce a cleaner grade of recyclable plastics,” she said.
What impact industry initiatives or legislation will have remains to be seen, but when more phones hit the reuse and recycling markets, Newman said, the infrastructure in this country is ready to process them. “We’ve handled huge spikes in collections before, and we have a very scalable operation. We’d love to get more phones.”
###
