Has your Apple iPhone 3 been languishing in a drawer since you got your iPhone 4? If you’re like many Americans, you may have an old cell phone – or three – gathering dust in a drawer somewhere. U.S. households contain more than 1 billion old phones, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates, which comes out to more than three per person. Today, much of that ends up in landfills, potentially leaching lead and other toxic materials into the soil and water.
A new group, called the Device Renewal Forum (DRF), hopes to reduce the amount of wireless e-waste that ends up in landfills while boosting the market for refurbished phones — and extending their lifetimes through reuse. If it succeeds, it could help stem the flood of electronic waste from phones: More cellphones ended up in the trash in 2009 than any other type of electronic product, according to the most recent data available from the EPA. That’s 129 million cellphones, compared to 29.4 million computers and 22.7 million televisions.
The group plans to work with others in the wireless industry to come up with standards for testing and certifying refurbished devices, which it calls “renewed” devices. It includes wireless carrier Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S); industry service companies Brightstar Corp. and ModusLink Global Solutions; wireless consortium CDMA Development Group; and eRecyclingCorps, a company that partners with carriers and retailers to give consumers instant in-store trade-in credit for their old phones, which it then sells to consumers in developing countries.
Source: GreenBiz
By Jennifer Kho