Worldwide, more than 5 billion people own cell phones, and many constantly get new ones.

Some people throw their old phones in the trash like any other piece of trash, ending up in landfills, breaking down and releasing toxins into the environment, and causing a loss of $ 55 billion annually of reusable resources that are wasted like gold.

Other people let the phones pile up in old drawers, until obsolescence and after a long time, they throw everything at once.

Let us make some others who try to be environmentally friendly and often look for appropriate recycling centers for the disposal of our cell phones, so that a cell phone can be restored and resold or useful parts of the interior can receive a second life. , without damaging the planet.

Find gold in the trash

In the USA, 416,000 cell phones enter landfills or incinerators every day, where they release toxins in the air, water and soil.

The best result is that your old phone is reused by another person after your hard drive is erased. You can sell it on websites such as eBay or Craigslist, donate it to second-hand stores or find a licensed recycler that can handle all the logistics for you.

Many of the electronics stores also accept old cell phones and then recycle or dispose of them responsibly.

Other places specialize in recycling to mitigate environmental damage.

The Lower East Side Ecology Center in New York has a second-hand store for old phones that it collects. Technicians clean the memory of a phone, fix broken parts and then fix it for later sale.

Phones that are too old or defective are collected and sold to recyclers, which separate devices and classify valuable resources from garbage. This reduces the demand for new phones and prevents harmful substances from being released into the environment.

However, the recycling process is often messy and occasionally represents a threat to workers, since most of the time, cell phone pallets are sent to other countries where recycling and disposal are sometimes not very rigorous.

When regulations are stricter, the recycling process is carried out more carefully.

Recycling electronic waste in the USA often requires people to look for legitimate and certified facilities.

In metropolitan areas, recyclers sometimes coordinate with building managers to collect electronic waste in bulk.

Garbage trucks collect large amounts of electronic waste and send them to facilities where they are demolished by human workers with mallets, crushed in assembly lines and screened by machines that separate precious minerals from the garbage and then turn it into dust.

Precious metals and plastic are collected in bags and sold to foundry operations or disposed of in a way that limits environmental pollution.

Even in this scenario, it is impossible to eliminate the environmental and health effects of electronic waste.

As awareness of electronic waste worldwide increases, some companies are looking for sustainable alternatives such as reducing, reusing and recycling.

So you already know. If you plan to dispose of your mobile phone, do it in an ecologically responsible way, look for a recycling place or a company that is dedicated to doing it for you in a responsible way.