Cell Phone Recycling in Numbers

The centerpiece of the urban mining movement is cell phones. The turnover on these devices is extremely high, and their mobility — the very characteristic that fueled their popularity in the first place — is the reason they are so carelessly tossed aside when no longer needed.

With gold, copper, tin and other precious metals hidden inside, these devices are the seemingly infinite pieces to an increasingly important trade. Here is how cell phone urban mining has skyrocketed in popularity.

In 2000, there were approximately 1 billion cell phones in the world. By the end of 2009, that number nearly tripled to 2.6 billion. Yet less than 1% of cell phones were recycled in 2003. In 2005, more than 500 million obsolete cell phones were sitting in desk drawers. Just sitting there.

To put cell phone use into perspective, take a look at subscribers just in the U.S. alone. In 1985, well before cell phone usage took off, there were 340,000 subscribers. Less than 20 years later, in 2004, the number was up to 180 million. These days, it’s well above 200 million.

Those 500 million cell phones just sitting in drawers? They’re full of copper, iron, nickel, silver, zinc, gold, manganese, palladium, platinum and tin. An estimated 8,102 metric tons of these precious metals reside in those devices — a value of more than $314 million.

To give you a better idea of the sheer amount of these metals in cell phones, consider this: The 2,100 metric tons of copper in cell phones retired annually and the 7,900 metric tons of copper in obsolete cell phones in storage would equal about 1% and 3.5%, respectively, of the copper recovered annually in the United States. That means those tiny bits of precious metals really do add up.

If you have an obsolete cell phone sitting at home, please consider properly disposing of it so that its useful parts can be reused.