What Happens To Your Phone?
What Happens to Your Mobile Phone?
Why recycle your mobile phone?
Every hour of every day approximately 1712 mobile phones are replaced in the UK alone. That’s about 428kgs of potentially harmful landfill created every hour! By recycling your unwanted handset, you are giving a new lease of life – providing much needed, affordable communications to those who need it most – people in developing countries. Phones that are too old, or beyond economical repair are sent for safe recycling, ensuring that nothing ends up in landfill.
Supporting Women Farmers in the Gambia
We have worked with Environment Times magazine since 2005 on a campaign of recycling mobile phones to help women farmers in the Gambia, West Africa.
The Gambian-run National Women Farmers' Association (NAWFA) has successfully supported 48,000 women working in 73 co-operative village groups since the 1990's, increasing their wealth and food security to cope with and overcome a lack of national infrastructure, adverse global financial and climate changes.
The partnership goes towards supporting their existing work of:
- Provision of low cost seeds, tools and equipment
- Co-operatives and farm marketing, producing good prices
- Assistance with training and literacy
- Setting up of added-value food processing in small factories
- Efficient crop production in times of rising food prices
- Allowing the women farmers to re-invest back into their families
Njagga Jawo, the executive director of NAWFA, has sent Environment Times the prices of items that the recycled mobile phones can support in the area of seeds, tools and equipment. Assuming that a phone is worth £5:
1 phone = 9kg rice seed, 28 kg maize seed, 14kg sesame seed, or 36 kg groundnut seed.
2 phones = 1kg of vegetable seeds (onion, aubergine 'garden egg', tomato; etc).
72 phones = a draught animal (such as an ox).
86 phones would get a sine hoe.
108 phones an eco-seeder or a plough.
862 mobiles purchases a power tiller, and to further alleviate women's drudgery plus give added cash value to products, 1,436 phones would get an oil expeller/refiner.
Returning your old mobile using the freepost address: FREEPOST GREEN GAMBIA will generate a donation directly to the NAWFA women farmers. Your unwanted mobile is worth a lot in a country whose average income is less than £210 per year.
Helping Micro-Entrepreneurs in Asia
Vilma Bautista runs a Sari-Sari store in Manila. She uses her mobile phone to order items such as clothes from warehouses in the local area. Access to a phone means that she doesn’t need to close her shop for days at a time to make the long journey across the city to make the order, and then repeat the trip to pick up the delivery some days later.
Pacita Bautla runs a family business with her husband and three daughters. The sell eggs and have been doing for over 20 years. They sell between 7-8000 eggs per day. They distribute these eggs through sellers and at their shop. By receiving a mobile phone, they are able to use the phone to contact egg dealers and roving sellers much more effectively than before.
Helping Romanian Nurses and Midwives in Ghana Treat Sick Children
Midwives in both Romania and Ghana previously travelled from village to village visiting families with sick children. They would write down the symptoms and travel back to the hospital – often miles away, delaying much needed treatment. Through the provision of affordable handsets, the midwives are now able to call the hospital, speak to a doctor and get a fast diagnosis and treatment.
Keeping African Elephants in Their Habitat
With towns expanding and African elephants losing much of their grazing area they would often travel into farmland and destroy crops. By providing the park rangers and local farmers with handsets, they are able to monitor the movement of the elephants and help keep them away from farmland and within their park.
Providing Affordable Communications to Nigerian Villagers
With only 5% of the population having access to a landline, mobile communications bring instant communications to remote villages where people previously had no way to speak to families, doctors and others outside their village.
Your mobile could become a traffic cone or used to heat a Swedish town
If your phone is too old or beyond repair, it is sent to Regenersis for safe and responsible recycling, ensuring that nothing goes to landfill. The circuit board goes to Sweden where the precious metals are extracted. The heat created during this process is used to heat the local town with virtually no emissions. The metal from your old charger is stripped out and the plastic is used to make things like traffic cones. The nickel from your old battery might be used to make a stainless steel saucepan.
Regenersis is always looking for innovative ways to put the materials from your mobile phone back into productive use.
