Recycling is something the governments have been promoting in the last few decades especially electronic goods recycling. The electronic goods recycling is much more different than the recycling of other products and consumables. Even large electronic devices are much easier to recycle. For instance, recycling a car and even a washing machine is much easier as compared to recycling a mobile phone due to its size. Every mobile phone contains almost all precocious metals including gold and silver. But these precocious metals are in small quantity and are in every mobile phone are used in a very complex manner and hard to extract.
Although many mobile phone manufacturers have their recycling platforms, there is an urgent need to make sure used and old mobile phones are recycled rather than head towards the landfill. Costs associated with separating precious metals from plastic and other materials often exceeds the value of the raw materials extracted and hence making mobile phones recycling a less desirable business for recyclers.
One of the best ways by which mobile phones should be recycled is to get them where they are needed after getting them refurbished. The main issue is the fact that these mobile phones do not reach places where they can be used as a mobile phone and have a second life. According to one report, there are almost 8 billion mobile phones in the market at the moment and that is way more than the devices which are being used. This is because a huge number of mobile phones are either broken and the users decided to upgrade or these mobile phones are just sitting somewhere in users house. If all these devices would have refurbished and bought back to the market, the demand for the newer models and a huge amount of natural resources could have been saved.
Electronics recycling is relatively a new term and it was first noticed when millions of desktop computers started getting replaced with newer faster and more advanced computers started appearing. But with time, this has well taken care of and these devices have found a path by which they get recycled but there is a huge number of parts which are extremely difficult to get recycled and end up in landfills.
Technological advancements have reduced the product life cycle of mobile phones especially in the advanced countries but they can be used in less advanced countries for many years after they have been discarded by users in advanced countries. In most of the advanced countries in the Western world, the product life cycle of mobile phone is less than 18 months ad is shrinking with every year passing by but in developing world where disposable income is far less than that of in advanced countries. That’s why older mobile phones still can have a life in developing countries. But for this, mobile phones need to reach developing countries rather than collecting dirt in your house.
There is another issue which needs to be addressed by mobile phone manufacturers and that is the screen prices. Several mobile phones become useless and beyond economical repair if the screen is broken. It wasn’t the case when smartphones started being manufactured but over time as technologies advanced the screens also became expensive and to compete for cheaper mobile phones the price of the mobile phone kept on coming down.
If you have a mobile phone and don’t use it any more you should sell your mobile phone. So that it finds a new home and is usable again. If all mobile phones are reused it will automatically reduce the demand for new mobile phones and eventually, we could slow down the speed by which the resources of the world are being used.
