Phone Recycling: The Altruistic Option

You may be aware that there are a number of specialist companies who willingly pay anything up to $200 for your old cell phone handset. The handset is then taken and recycled, using a number of different methods. Sometimes the component parts of the cell phone – such as the screen, the keyboard or the battery – are redistributed to create other working handsets, and sometimes the handsets are simply resold whole for profit.

This, of course, solves two problems: it takes the handset off your hands and keeps another unwanted phone potentially out of a waste landfill site. Everybody wins; especially as you may find yourself getting cash for something you had considered worthless.

There is, however, a downside to the phone recycling industry: the better the handset, the higher the price. If, for example, you wanted to ‘recycle’ an iPhone, you would be looking in the region of $200. However… who wants to recycle something that is a recent handset? You’d be better off selling it on eBay – even if it is broken. No, what most of us need is a way to dispose of our really old handsets – the bricks we had when we considered text messaging alone the very forefront of technology. These handsets are worth $10-$15 at most, and with delivery costs it just isn’t worth it.

So we need a solution: something that gets rid of our old handsets from clogging up our homes, but keeps the phones out of landfill waste. If you phone is still in working order, contact a charity and donate it to them. You won’t get any money for it, but a little altruism goes a long way – and that phone will be put to excellent use.

The Ins and Outs of Phone Recycling

In the 21st century, it would seem that one is not complete without the latest cell phone. With newer and more advanced handsets constantly springing upon the market, the compulsion to keep ahead of the tech game and constantly upgrade handsets for the latest ‘it’ model is extreme – and it’s no wonder the cell phone market is one of the most profitable technology industries in the world.

Throughout the last ten years, the average 30 year old adult is estimated to have had six different cell phone handsets. So what happens to those handsets that have had their day, replaced by shiny new models? While some consumers may be savvy and list their unwanted cells for sale on auction sites like eBay, the vast majority of people will throw the phones away – often by simply dropping them in with their household trash.

This extra pressure on an already over-burdened world of waste has lead to a rise in ‘phone recycling’. There are numerous companies that specialize in taking unwanted handsets and making them useful again – or, at the very lease, recycling the component parts and preventing them from ending up in landfill.

Most of these companies will pay anything from $20 to $200 – depending on your handset – for your old, unused phone. Some companies will not require the phone to be in working order; so you really have nothing to lose, and a lot of cash and environmental points to gain. So before you throw last year’s cell away, see what you could get for it and recycle.

The UK’s Landfill Problem

The United Kingdom is currently being presented with a difficult situation, and one that all major nations should take as a warning for how things may go if they do not adapt recycling in to their lifestyles. While the United Kingdom has one of the biggest economies in the world, what it does lack is land – in fact, several US states have a larger land mass than the British Isles.

In the UK – and in most major first world countries – the conventional means of disposing of household and business waste is by using “land fill”. Essentially, land is dug up, waste is insert in to the hole and then the land is refilled. A fairly abhorrent practice, but so far the best that the world has come up with in terms of waste disposal.

The problem in the United Kingdom, however, is that their small land mass and their reliance on using landfill to dispose of waste has caused a problem. These two facts are not compatible, and before long (some say in as soon as seven years), the UK is quite literally going to run out of land to dispose their waste in. The consequences of this would be extreme; land previously dismissed for landfill use due to its heritage or attractive qualities will have to become the property of the waste of a nation, and there is also the unseemly fact that eventually even the ‘good’ land will run out.

The answer, of course, is recycling. When waste is recycled and used again, there is no need for it to ever grace the fields of a country and become part of a landfill.

Raising A Glass To Recycling

Of all of the materials that can be recycled, glass is one of the most rewarding in terms of efficiency and value. Here is a statistic – if you place a glass bottle in a landfill, it could take as long as a million years to decompose. However, if you place it in a recycling bin it can be made into a new glass bottle within less than a month.

If that isn’t a good enough reason to recycle glass, then think on this. Glass is the only material that is 100% efficient in its recycling. That is to say that if you recycle a glass bottle, you will get the same standard of glass from the process that you put into it – and this cycle holds permanently so the same container could be recycled forever with no loss of quality.

If you go to the supermarket today and buy something in a glass bottle, the likelihood is that seventy per cent of the glass in that bottle will have come from a recycling process. On the other hand, to make glass from scratch – a process that features heating substances to a temperature of more than two thousand degrees Fahrenheit – it requires energy and causes a lot of pollution.

Recycled glass is also probably the safest recycled material of all, because it has very little chemical interaction with anything it comes into contact with. This means that very little newly-recycled glass has to be disposed of because it does not come up to an acceptable standard.

Recycling? Yes You “Can” – Recycle Aluminum Cans

If you stop for a moment to think about the amount of soda that the average person drinks in a year, and then think how many cans that adds up to, it is quite something to picture all those metal and aluminum cans piled up. If you then think about how many cans an entire town, city, or state will drink in a year, then the amount of cans stuck in landfills has to be something utterly remarkable. And the thing is, putting cans in the trash and letting them go to landfill really makes no sense when it is so easy to recycle.

An interesting fact is that it takes eight tons of bauxite – the raw material which is turned into aluminium – to make one tonne of aluminium. This means that making aluminium from scratch takes a lot of energy and depletes existing bauxite reserves at quite a rate. By recycling aluminium cans, as well as other forms of aluminum products, it is estimated that a saving in energy of 92% is made compared to making it from bauxite. This is a quite astounding saving in energy terms, and when you consider the amount of bauxite it takes to make virgin aluminium, it only makes sense to recycle cans.

Aluminium cans are present in just about every household in the country. It would be an amazing change if even half of the people who drink or eat goods from aluminium containers were to take those containers to be recycled – saving the country and the individual money and effort in the long run.

Science And Recycling: What Is Possible?

For so long, we were unaware of how the environment was affected by what we have come to consider as human activity. As a result, in the present day we find ourselves running somewhat to catch up, and the only way that we can get more out of ourselves in the recycling process is to look to science for help. How can the scientific sector help us to make the future cleaner and greener. What is on offer as a recycling head start?

Scientists are working on a system of making fuel from biomass – a word to describe any materials we dispose of that may be able to biodegrade fast and have another use. As things stand, biomass fuel is still very much a niche industry – but if it gets the opportunity it could be the solution to two problems in one. Less burning of fossil fuels means less harm to the air quality and less contribution to global warming. The use of garbage of fuel means more space in landfills.

Recent advances in the recycling of paper have included “deinking”, a system which draws the ink from newsprint as part of the recycling process. The outcome of this is that recycled paper is now of a better quality than ever, making it usable in a wider range of processes and lessening the need to cut down trees for the purposes of making virgin paper. The logic inherent in doing this is obvious. More trees means less carbon dioxide, more recycled paper means less pollution – allowing us to cut the amount of pollutants in our environment.

Recycling 101: Why Not The Landfill?

The chief alternative to recycling one’s household waste is to throw it in the garbage and let the municipal trash disposal professionals get rid of it. This will, usually, mean that it ends up in a landfill. But this in itself is not new information – mostly we already knew that. The question we need to address in order to decide if we want to recycle is “what happens in the landfill?”. Is it a wise choice for our trash disposal needs?

The idea is that, when placed in landfill, the substances we throw away will biodegrade – that is, they will decompose and eventually form part of the soil. Up to a point, this is true, but one reason why people are favoring recycling is that our landfills are very quickly filling up. Not only does this mean that we are throwing away more than is decomposing, but it also means that the landfills become very tightly packed – thus not allowing oxygen – a vital part of efficient biodegrading – to get through.

A recent study took a look at various landfills and the rubbish that was found on lower levels of the compacted garbage. Some of what was found included fruit, veg and meat that was over a quarter of a century old and still recognizable. Newspapers were found from the 1950s which were still readable. In order for the process of biodegrading to be truly effective, more space would be needed -–something that we aren’t going to get if we keep piling recyclable garbage on top of what is already in landfills.

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