How are old mobile phones recycled?

Up until very recently, very few children had their own mobile phones. This was partly due to widespread reluctance amongst parents to let their children have them, and partly due to the prohibitive cost of both the handsets themselves and the phone calls made on them.

Many parts of your old mobile can be reclaimed and reused. Any plastic parts can be melted down for recycling very easily. Also, an average of 16 per cent of the weight of your mobile handset is made up of metals of different types. These include platinum and silver, all of which can be reclaimed. All in all, this adds up to around 80 per cent of your phone being of use for recycling.

The poisonous elements that cannot be recycled tend to be cadmium and lead. These have to be extracted and then treated separately for disposal.

Giving a child their own cell phone can be a good way to teach them responsibility, and the value of money. A pay as you go phone will give children an immediate sense of how much their phone use is costing them, and will convince them of the need to limit their phone use for financial reasons.

Further to recycling, several mobile phone companies, all members of GSM, have teamed up to promise standardization on mobile phone chargers by 2012 for most cell phones. This is to help combat the huge numbers of useless old chargers that are thrown away every day. So this is another step in the right direction when it comes to mopping up the mess caused by our mobile phone usage.

Another common concern is that children will run up giant phone bills by talking to their friends all the time, without realising how much it is costing.

The second step you should take is to remove any personal details from your phone that you may not want other people to see. If your phone is going to be reused rather than being broken down and recycled for parts, then you should at least do a hard reset which will restore your phone to its original factory setting wiping most of your personal data.

You may need to carry out further steps to completely erase everything, but this depends on your handset type. To find out what is required to wipe all info off your phone, check by going to the website of your mobile phone manufacturer, or be checking the Cell Phone Data Eraser program online.

The poisonous elements that cannot be recycled tend to be cadmium and lead. These have to be extracted and then treated separately for disposal.

Giving a child their own cell phone can be a good way to teach them responsibility, and the value of money. A pay as you go phone will give children an immediate sense of how much their phone use is costing them, and will convince them of the need to limit their phone use for financial reasons.